Humphries Bay

Three weekends ago I went on my first backpacking trip in New Zealand. I am 10 minutes away from an amazing system of mountain bike trails, so I haven’t been hiking (or ‘tramping’ as it is known down here) much, but I had a free weekend and found a promising looking campsite on the map. Humphries Bay campsite, on the shores of Lake Tarawera, is not far as the crow flies from where I am, but can only be circuitously approached from my direction due to a matrix of smaller lakes and private pastures. I decided on a promising route, about 20km by road, about 10km by mountain bike on the dual-use Western Okataina Walkway, then about 10km hiking down the coast of Lake Ōkataina on the Eastern Okataina Walkway.

Biking with a full backpack can get awkward, but I managed to balance it so that it wasn’t much of a hassle. More of a hassle was the fact that the “dual-use path” was largely only so in words. It was an old logging road, which over time has gotten quite rutted. Recent rains made every depression into a mud pit that sucked your momentum at the bottom of hills, and overgrown gorse prevented any quick descents. It passed through many lovely sections of forest, but as a whole I was not impressed and definitely won’t be returning by bike. On the positive side, although delays “riding” the track set me back over an hour, it gave me an opportunity to try out my new 1000 lumen bike-light in the gathering dusk. At the halfway point, where it turned to an actual tramping track, I locked my bike in the woods.

The Eastern Okataina Walkway was as nice a tramping track as the Western was poor. It skirts the edge of the lake, sometimes running along the shore and sometimes taking a shortcut over ridges, but never getting really steep. Due to its gentle grade and quality construction it remains fairly smooth and dry without any added rockwork, although I did find one section with unsuccessful tree fern trunk causeways. It made for a peaceful night hike in, with the almost-full moon reflecting off the rippling surface of the lake through the trees and the gentle sound of waves lapping the shore carrying on the night breezes. I came around one corner to see what looked like thousands of small eyes dappling the underside of a bank; it was actually the New Zealand glowworm, the larvae of the Arachnocampa luminosa fungus gnat. Around another corner I startled a passel of possums (common brushtail possum). Most of them darted off into the woods or climbed a tree, but one particularly daft individual set off down the trail in front of me. Every time I would get closer it would run ahead again, but even when there were not steep slopes on either side it took it about a kilometer to figure out that it could go sideways and I wouldn’t ‘chase’ it. I hope I didn’t disrupt its possum social life too much by leading it so far away.

The campsite was a sight for sore eyes after the trip, and I quickly set up my hammock and rainfly. I woke up in the morning to raindrops splattering on the fly and the sun shining through. Clouds hung over Mount Tarawera on the far shore, but otherwise the lake was tranquil and clear and cold. I only saw two other people pass through the campsite that morning, I guess the chance of rain kept away all the other campers and trampers. The hike back was like a new trail, being able to see everything. The trail dipped down to the lakeshore a few times, and across a sandy beach once. With the semi-tropical foliage and the trail cut into cliffside (and the waterside campsite with composting privies) it reminded me a lot of the hike into Waimanu. I biked the sealed road back, and made it to the Rotorua airport before the skies opened up and dumped like they had been threatening to do all weekend, but not enough to dampen my spirits.

This past weekend I headed off on another tramping trip on the Whirinaki Track in the Whirinaki Te Pua-a-Tane Conservation Park with the Rotorua Tramping Club. I look forward to telling you all about it soon.

Mount Tarawera across the lake, wreathed in clouds.

Bikepacking

Masterton

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to see another part of the country, as I drove down with my colleagues to measure plots in Masterton, an hour North of Wellington and a five hour drive from Rotorua. New Zealand doesn’t believe in superhighways, the national speed limit is 100kmph (62mph) and the roads tend to rarely exceed four lanes, so I got a lot of great sightseeing as we meandered around. We stopped for a rest break at the entrance to Tongariro National Park, which includes Mount Ngauruhoe, the volcano that played Mount Doom in LotR, and its neighbor, the jagged Mount Ruapehu, the tallest point on the North Island. I could see those peaks looming in front of us for many kilometers as we approached, in dazzling blankets of snow. There is a trail, the Tongariro Northern Circuit, that loops around the flanks of both mountains, climbs the pass between them and summits Ngauruhoe (not in that order), and I hope I have the opportunity while I am here to go back down there and hike it. Our drive also took us past windswept, scrubby, misty pastures that were quite reminiscent of passing Pohakuloa Training Area (PTA) on Saddle, especially with billboards advertising the approaching New Zealand National Army Museum. The road continued, clinging to the face of valley walls that dropped to sapphire streams scores of meters below and loomed in crags above, past rolling hills liberally speckled with fluffy sheep, and signs warning motorists to look out for kiwi birds during nighttime hours.

By the time we arrived in Masterton it was too late to drive out to the forest to check out our plots, so we had the late afternoon free. When I decided to come to New Zealand, I made vague plans to check out the factory of Tuatahi Racing Axes & Saws, the origin of most of the Dartmouth Woodsmens Team axes. As it happens, the Tuatahi factory was not just in Masterton, but only a 12 minute walk from the motel where we were staying. I actually missed the building the first time we passed, as “factory” may have been a bit of a grandiose term for the location, exaggerated by the company’s international prominence in Timbersports. Tuatahi is based out of a modest workshop the size of an auto-repair shop, which is more than enough to produce small numbers of very high quality tools, and they are just the right size for their business model. There isn’t a showroom, just a front office with assorted articles about its history and trinkets, such as a painted axe-head and an antique peg-and-raker (perforated lance-tooth pattern). The receptionist was more than happy to chat with us about the company and sport (and assure us that his missing leg and arm had nothing to do with a Timbersports accident). He says that it great to be able to connect with people around the world, but taking orders online lacks the personal feel of talking to people face to face to get their product exactly right. So many big online retailers make the purchasing process nothing more than a simple click-and-ship, with the product arriving on your doorstep in a few days, and some customers don’t understand that small custom shops just don’t work like that. Tuatahi makes all of their tools to order, whether they are work axes or top of the line racing axes. An axe takes about 6 months from waitlist to finish, and saws are about two years. All customers get the same respect; whether they are Jason Wynyard (Kiwi and 8x STIHL World Champion!) or Joan Smith they progress through the queue the same. Big names in the Timbersports community are usually better about knowing how these workshops operate and expecting the delay. Due to safety regulations we couldn’t tour the actual workshop, but I could see through the windows a saw being tuned and tested, as well as half a dozen axes waiting to be hand finished and inspected before being shipped out across the world. Out in the yard I also saw assorted sheets of metal that the saws had been cut out of. This time around I only got a T-shirt, but perhaps someday in the future I will still enjoy Timbersports and be back in New Zealand and I can return to get an ax.

For the official reason we were down there, we went out into the forest (‘into the bush’) and measured plots. Our first location was, like many, in a commercial timber production forest. Driving around felt similar to PTA again, as for safety reasons we were constantly checking in on the radio. On our way to our sites (after taking a bit of an erroneous loop on the ever-changing network of logging roads) we passed an active logging site. Working with logs this Summer on Trail Crew gave me a new appreciation for how the logs were being moved around, most impressively by a machine with a tower with many cables like a Griphoist® pulling logs up slopes that were too steep for trucks. When we finally approached our site, we had a bit of a worried moment when out Toyota Hilux (it’s a truck down here) started sliding a bit on the steep muddy road, so we hiked the last 2km in. This site was a plot of eucalyptus, mostly about 60cm in diameter (fun fact: the exact length of one of my dbh tapes). We were measuring it again after many years, and half the fun was finding the painted

numbers on tree trunks (#treesearch (btw the actual October guest wifi password for this very professional national forest research institute I work at)). This was made more difficult by the frequent steep, muddy slopes, the dense undergrowth (‘scrub’), and the fact that some of the marked trees had fallen facedown on their numbers. The trees were also numbered in order as you went clockwise from North (easy), and then in random directions if a 360⁰ rotation didn’t come up to the needed 24 samples (not so easy). Our next set of plots was significantly more devoid of scrub, but on even more of a slope. We were establishing new plots, so each tree had to be assessed for eligibility as to whether it was within the plot radius. The hypsometer we used for measuring height could give us distance, but a few trees were close enough that we had to run out the transect tape to split centimeters. Our third set of plots was at the top of a 38% grade (21⁰ slope), which due to a GPS error we climbed twice. Instead of a circle it had been laid out in a square, and about half of the trees had been felled, making it quite a game to piece back together for the datasheets. To make it even more fun, they were members of the stringybark group of Eucalyptus, so the painted numbers were puzzles themselves even when you found them. Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun. The weather was gorgeous for three of the days, and the open understories and steep slopes gave views out across the rolling green hills spotted with sheep. We ran out of time to measure the plots of Coastal redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), with their awesome gigantic DBHs, but that will just come another day.

 

Hobbiton!

When thinking about exploring New Zealand, checking out the filming locations for Lord of the Rings is high on my list. I was in luck, as in my first day’s wanderings around Rotorua I found a storefront filled with LotR merchandise and offering tours of Hobbiton. A few days later, I was on my way. Because it was 8am on a grey and drizzling morning there were only four of us, all the better for a personal feel to the tour. Rotorua is an hour’s drive from Matamata, where the Alexander sheep farm contains the Hobbiton movie set, but the drive through the countryside was interesting in itself. Right on the edge of town is a park full of active steam vents, beyond that is a dormant volcano with billboards advertising all sorts of adventure sports, and beyond that it fades into endless rolling green hills spotted with sheep and cattle. We crossed over the Kaimai Range, and in the rain the tree-fern lined highway reminded me of the road up to Volcano.

We rolled into Shire’s Rest, the Hobbiton site, along the aptly named Buckland Road (the name actually precedes the filming). Our guide explained the history of the site, with the assistance of a video of Peter Jackson, about how the Alexander farm was spotted by air and fit all the hopes and dreams Jackson had of Hobbiton (minus the oak tree over Bag End); how they built twenty-odd hobbit holes for the LotR set; how they were delayed by a storm halfway through dismantling them upon completion; how even the remains of the set became a popular tourist destination; and how they rebuilt the set in full and permanently, adding a dozen more holes, for the filming of The Hobbit to make it the attraction it is today. We were led into Hobbiton through the same cut in the bank where Frodo jumps into Gandalf’s cart (and learned about forced perspective). The gardens in Hobbiton are planted with real vegetables, and the gardeners are allowed to take home the produce they harvest. Smoke curls out of many chimneys, from small woodchip stoves that smolder all day. Our guide explained to us that the hobbit holes were constructed to everything from 60% to 100% scale depending on whether they were meant to exaggerate the height of Gandalf walking by, or to make the Hobbits seem short. I got a picture in the doorway of the only hobbit hole they let us poke around inside of, but I made the 90% look more like a 60%. Most of the holes only appeared for a few seconds in the films, but each had little details to set it apart, from the laundry on lines to children’s toys in the yards. There even are holes built in the next little valley over that never show up in the movies, built to maintain the illusion if the camera panned up too far in a sweeping shot. That valley had tree-ferns and what appeared to be a Pandanus in it, vegetation I don’t remember seeing in the movies (I’ll have to watch them again to check).

Bag End is the crown jewel of Hobbiton, built at 100% scale and with a complete foyer to allow that shot of looking out through the round green door at the ‘sunset.’ The sunset was actually a sunrise, as Bag End faces East, the actors actually woke up really early and acted everything in reverse before the film was flipped to make the sun appear to sink. The iconic tree above Bag End was one of the few things not already perfect on site. Peter Jackson had an oak tree brought in and planted there for LotR. It was chopped down when filming was complete, and they were unable to find an identical tree for The Hobbit (supposedly fans would complain at the inaccuracy), so they built a replica from steel and foam, with thousands of hand-painted silk leaves, aged back 50 years to fit the timeline. Our guide said we could keep any fallen leaves as a souvenir, but I didn’t see one. The tour ended at the Green Dragon Inn with a complimentary hobbit-brewed beverage (I had the surprisingly good Frogmorton Ginger Beer and an Oatbarton Brew traditional English ale) and a hearty fire to warm up after the chilly English Shire weather.

Hobbiton was great, whimsical, and definitely worth a visit. I hope to see several more filming locations before I leave, albeit the geographical landscapes.

90% life size you say?

Sam Gamgee's house

An Unexpected Party

I suppose I have been interested in visiting New Zealand for quite a while. It drew me with the same things that would capture the attention of anyone - spectacular scenery from The Lord of the Rings, interesting accents, world-class Timbersports, fascinating and uniquely biodiverse ecosystems evolved in isolation over millions of years, passionate rugby, deep culture, fluffy sheep . . . I had the chance to make this dream a reality earlier this year, when Dr. Dean Meason (Dean the Kiwi), a former graduate student of my father’s, mentioned that the project he was working on at Scion (formerly New Zealand Forest Research Institute) was looking to hire a field and lab technician. This was an opportunity both to expand my experience working in another aspect of forest ecology research, and to explore this fascinating country I might not have a chance to visit again. Dean pointed out to me that I was eligible for New Zealand’s Working Holiday Visa Scheme, where as a young American I could easily be allowed to come to New Zealand and pick up temporary employment to cover the cost of traveling around the country for up to a year. Sure enough, when I filled out and submitted the application this Summer, my application fee was waved and my visa was approved in about three days. The plane tickets were a pretty penny, but soon I was set and committed to six months in Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud.

After a long flight, although New Zealand Air is much more luxurious than United (it gives you meals and seatback entertainment [including all of the Lord of the Rings movies]), I landed in Auckland. I had time before my connection, so I decided to walk the 650 meters over to the domestic terminal rather than wait for the shuttle. After following the green line for what seems like several kilometers and a doubling of my duffel’s weight, I came to another sign cheerfully informing me I had only 650 meters to go. What. Eventually I made it though, and I was surprised how small the domestic terminal in the airport of New Zealand’s largest city was. The plane down to Rotorua was small enough that I had to check my carry-on as well, and we walked across the tarmac and up a rolling staircase to board the plane. It was raining in Rotorua as we landed, but coming from Hilo I was unfazed. Taking a taxi into town gave me my first real taste of driving on the left, which I am still working to get used to.

Rotorua has a climate closest to San Francisco, but even that doesn’t quite fit. I arrived in Spring, there is still a chill in the air many days and I am glad that I have wool layers. Along with the tree-ferns and the pervasive smell of sulphur from geothermal activity it often reminds me of Volcano Village. The city itself is similar to Hilo, with a downtown district, about 10 minutes away from my house by bike, touching the shore of Lake Rotorua. I found five different bike shops in close proximity, and got a Giant Talon 4 for the duration of my stay here. There is an extensive trails network in the forest just a few blocks over, and plenty of more riding opportunities fairly close as well. Things are generally a bit more expensive, and I have not been able to find any size 15 trail-runners, but there are also some great little hole-in-the-wall bookshops. Definitely at times it feels far away and alien, but then I’ll see Starbucks, or hear Kiwi covers of ‘Our Song’ or ‘Shut Up and Dance’ over the store radio, and I am reminded that it really isn’t that foreign after all.

Stay tuned for further adventures as I start work, visit Hobbiton, go mountain biking, and countless more explorations of Kiwiland. Thanks for coming along; shoot me a blitz, I’d love to hear from you!

Aloha Hawai'i, Kia Ora Aotearoa!

Welcome to New Zealand!

Far over the Misty Mountains cold. . .

The next street over.