Kindness and Cold Water: A Nelson Lakes Adventure (May 15-18)

“Absolute can’t miss”, “my favorite hut in New Zealand”, “I dream of this trail”: these phrases have been haunting me for months, and only hardened my determination to make it to Nelson Lakes National Park in the Northwest corner of New Zealand. This past weekend, we finally made it, as a smaller-than-normal crowd of me, Elodie, Lily, and Dylan. 

We left early Thursday morning and booked it up the East Coast, passing through Kaikoura and driving the coastal stretch that completed my loose goal of driving all of the coastal roads around the South Island. 

The drive itself was an emotional journey for me. As we drove through Kaikoura, I found myself struck by how fast the semester has sped by, how it feels like both a thousand years ago and last week that we first piled into Sal and drove to the coast, where Lodie and I had our first one-on-one connection of the semester and where we learned that eight people in one car is too many. As we wound along the rocky coastline I found myself brought to tears by the circular nature of our return here, of how grateful I am for everything that has happened since I last saw this stretch of coastline. I wrote this in my notes app as we drove:

This weekend I drove back in time. 

Over the winding back roads that scared the shit out of me when my friends were first learning how to drive on the left side of the road, when we piled 8 of us into our 7 seater and drove through golden summer forest mountains to the coast. 

Through Kaikoura where we ate greasy fish and chips wrapped in paper, and bickered about hikes, and where I knew Lodie and I would be friends forever as we talked so intensely we got barked at and chased by a sea lion. 

Back then the semester stretched before us like the unbroken water, nothing between us and Australia, nothing but time and possibility of new mountains and new connections. 

Now the mountains are snow capped and the semester is running short, our days left together countable on one hand, all of us looking ahead to new horizons and seasons elsewhere.

We drove up to Picton, where I drove after getting off the ferry with Tiger and said “I can’t believe I’m not leaving this island with you”, the landscape that first welcomed me to this island I’ve been calling home, where it first really hit me how monumentally my life was about to change and stretch, how inconceivable the sights would be. 

We turned South again, after the hike, and drove back to Christchurch through the inland route, on roads I know now like I know the roads of home, sleepily resting my head on friends’ shoulders as we sped back to the present, back to our Ilam apartments and the final few weeks of growing and changing the semester would hold. 

Up through Picton and back down through the spine of the South Island, we pulled into St. Arnaud just after 4pm, too late to store our bags at the visitor center, and started driving up Mt. Robert to the start of our journey. 

We departed the trailhead around 5pm, with packs heavily freighted with a gourmet selection of food for the weekend. Up we wound, along Mt. Robert and out over Lake Rotoiti, beyond which we could see the twinkling lights of St. Arnaud as the sun started to set. As we watched clouds mottled with purple and gray, we discussed the state of gender and sexuality politics among young people and admired the views through a light rain shower. Within an hour and a half we had made it to Bushline Hut, our first stop, without even having to get out our headlamps. 

We spent a cozy evening with some less-than-thrilled hut companions, eating butter chick-pea-en and crossing our fingers about the weather forecast. We labeled this trip “Kindness Weekend”, with promises of communicating gently and kindly with each other, taking as many breaks as we needed to and spoiling ourselves rotten with downtime and good food. As is true of any group that spends as much time together as we have, there’s been a tendency to get sharp when we don’t need to, and this weekend we were determined to break down those tendencies and get back to the gooshy, loving parts of our friendship. 

In the spirit of Kindness Weekend, we slept in on Friday, ate our oatmeal slowly, and left the hut last, emerging into a crisp, clear, stunning day for tackling Robert’s Ridge. The ridge, like many ridges, is famously windy. Something about high winds has a tendency to remind me of every other place I’ve ever been with high winds, so all day I was channeling Torres del Paine, Halifax, and the Tongariro.

We had a perfect weather day for the ridge, with no rain and only 50 km/hour gusts (!). That said, there was little desire for stopping, so we mostly walked straight through it, taking in the greywacke peaks around us. I love a trail where I can see where I’m going from miles away, and loved watching the peaks shift as we wound our way around faroff ant trails. The ridge itself was mostly a maintained track, with some serious scrambling on scree fields beneath peaks, making for a good level of excitement. It was stunning, lakes and valleys on both sides of us, farmland in the distance on one side, jagged peaks ringed with green on the other. It reminded me a lot of the stacked peaks of the Kepler Track, and was far more beautiful than I anticipated. 

The end of the track involved descending into a stunning glacial cirque where Angelus Hut is located, perched between two beautiful little lakes and ringed by peaks. We made it there by 3pm, devoured a late lunch, and explored the surroundings. Just as the sun started descending below the edge of the ridge, Dylan, Lodie, and I went for a swim, dunking in some of the coldest water I’ve been in in a long time. The sky was all gold and bright blue, and it felt good to be alive. Refreshed, revived, and making a lot of noise, we settled into the hut for the night, having tortellini with leftover pizza sauce and wood stove grilled garlic bread. Yum. 

Spot the hut!

This hut itself did not disappoint. Huge glass windows looked out over the lakes and ridge with a bench wrapping all the way around above a giant deck I imagine to be quite full in the summer months, capacity for 28 people, a woodstove, and a big kitchen. That night we shared the hut with only three people, and they were the last people we saw for the entire trip. Our plan was to spend all of Saturday lounging around in the hut, avoiding wet and windy weather, then hike out Sunday when the forecast had hopefully improved. Upon seeing the hut and surroundings, I became very confident we had made the right call. We spent the evening chilling out by the fire and called it an early night. 

I woke up around sunrise the next morning to a gray, chilly-looking world. I stoked the woodfire and made coffee, reading my book by the windows as everyone else got up. What followed was the most perfect chill morning of all time, in which we pulled our mattresses out around the fire, read, ate, played cards, went for another dip, and generally had zero aspirations. We cooked cinnamon rolls on the woodstove, had pizza pita pockets for lunch, and snacked incessantly in between. We had so much delicious food, and laid around so extensively, that I didn’t even have to choke down any oatmeal. Dreamy. 

Lodie keeping us warm

Lily keeping us fed

By around 2pm, I got itchy to do something, and recruited Lodie to go for an adventure. “5 minutes one way, 5 minutes the other, that’s it” I promised as we set out towards another lake just over the opposite ridge from where we’d come into the valley. We stumbled on the most beautiful lookout at the peaks across the main valley just as the sky cleared enough to show them off, and had a photo shoot before continuing around the lake on a trail that became increasingly difficult to find. By the time we had reached the other side of the lake, we were just scrambling around in a foggy moonscape of scree and red rocks. The fog kept rolling in and out, obscuring and revealing our surroundings such that it felt like they could change at any moment. One minute we could see Angelus Hut, a few hundred feet higher than the level of the lake we contoured around, and the next moment it was just us, the world sliding past like a microscope slide.

We kept scrambling up around the cirque, gunning for the ridge so we could see over further. As we went, kicking rocks down behind us and squealing every time we started sliding down the incredibly steep rock face, the fog closed in so it was just us and the wall, not a sight to be seen anywhere else. It was incredibly eerie, and incredibly epic. We made it to the top where the wind kicked up strongly, flattening us against the wild rock formations sitting like gargoyles at the top of the ridge.

The top, just before my phone died

By this time, we had been out for 2.5 hours and darkness was fast approaching, so we turned around to find our trail again. Lodie is the kind of friend who I feel like I can say anything to, no matter how many times we’ve said it before or how trivial, and I’ll always be met with respect and curiosity. She calls me out on my shit in an awesome way, and I love our solo venturing through any landscape, whether it’s a bike ride through the park in Christchurch or a full-on scramble in the backcountry. Our semester has been so full of all-out adventures where we’re working hard from early in the morning until after dark such that we haven’t had that much time for this kind of scramble, with no objective and no ideas, just walking to walk until we want to turn back. 

Our return trip was slightly more harried, in that I of course did not want to be walking in the dark, my phone was dead, and I worried our friends were worried about us. The day felt like it was on a dimmer switch, as the fog closed in further and the day got darker with every minute. We found our return trail before it was fully dark, but by the time we approached the hut, I was holding Lodie’s phone to illuminate both of our paths. I was being sort of a bad hiking buddy during this time, in that I kept walking as fast as I wanted and leaving her behind to try to encourage her to speed up, I suppose. Bad vibes.

We made it back to the hut just after 6, about an hour after sunset, to a low-key panicked Lily and Dylan. After many apologies and drying-off, plus recognition that we officially had the hut to ourselves, we settled in for another night of lying by the woodstove, eyes half closed, eating mac and cheese and chatting about nothing. We made chocolate croissants on the wood stove for dessert, and also ate an entire bar of chocolate. Oh, how I’ll miss these nights. 

We fell asleep right there, by the woodstove, on scattered mattresses and surrounded by a detritus of books and chocolate wrappers, completely and totally ensconced in the moment. 

The night was wild and windy, with gusts so loud they woke me up often, including one so extreme it sounded like the entire hut might blow over, which woke all of us up. By 7am I was wide-awake and doing some anxious calculus about how much food we had, in case the wind didn’t let up and we didn’t want to risk the wind up on the ridge, given how bad it was in our protected area by the lake. 

We waited and snoozed for a bit, then silently and simultaneously decided the wind had died down enough and everyone got to work packing up for our departure. We were out by 10am, into an extremely wet day. It felt like we were inside a cloud, in that it wasn’t actively raining but we were all soaked the moment we left the hut. Hoods down, hats on, I followed the leader blindly up out of the cirque and along the tops only for a few minutes until we caught the intersection with the Speargrass Track which, rather than following the ridge up and down for miles to get back to the carpark, was a straight down ascent/descent, followed by some river valley walking back. The descent was extremely wet, with the trail in many places having turned into a creek, and multiple cartoonish slips and falls en route. We had to cross a stream a number of times, including one crossing that was legitimately above my knees. Needless to say, my feet were wet all day. 

We made good time to the Speargrass Hut, where we momentarily stripped off our soaked layers and ate lunch indoors. By this point, we were all feeling the urgency of getting back to the car and out of the rain, so it was a quick stop before we picked up again, redressing in the soggiest of layers. My grumpy hike portion came that afternoon, in which we were traipsing through a gorgeous native beech forest contouring around a river, a lovely situation no doubt, but I was emotionally elsewhere, and sad about it. I thought I was being very sneaky with my desires, but Lily later said that when I said “wow this silence is so nice, we’re never silent” and kept speeding ahead of the group, she knew damn well what was going on.

Grumpy time

We were back on the road by 3:45 and were greeted by a truly stunning double rainbow over the lake as we practically skipped down the road to the car. 

We wanted to swim here but there were 6 foot long eels hiding under the dock... no thanks

On the drive home we stopped in the town of Murchison and indulged in the greatest burger I’ve probably ever had as we sat in a garden and watched the sun set over the mountains. We chowed down on burgers and tacos, soaking in the joy we’ve all brought each other this semester and some truly delicious food. 

In another of my favorite experiences of the year, as we sat in the garden squished onto a couch together, shivering in the cold and waiting for our food, we heard a song over the PA system which will forever be shaped by that moment. The song, Motel 6 by River Whyless, is a favorite of mine, and will always now remind me of this moment of time, in which I’ve spent a long time moving and on the road, surrounded by beloved friends for the past year living out my dreams, and the thought of that coming to an end is both terrifying and exciting–because who knows what will come next.

I've spent my whole life movin'

I've spent my whole life on a road

From a dream, I'm wakin' up

And for the first time, I'm terrified of wakin' up alone