Axemen's Carnival!

The weekend finally arrived in January for my first competition in New Zealand woodsmens! Held during the Rotorua Agricultural & Pastoral (A&P) Show, this Axemen’s Carnival was one of the larger ones of the year, with several national or world championships and a few thousand dollars (NZ) of prize money to be distributed. I was lucky enough to be able to sign up to participate, the annual membership waved due to the brevity of my stay and only the modest entry fees and handicap booklets to purchase. I was all prepped the Friday before, when I realized I hadn’t assembled my outfit yet. It is the official dress code for New Zealand Axemen to wear white shoes and pants. This is probably to match with the posh uniforms of cricket and polo, but I suspect it is also to make it more obvious if you cut yourself on a razor-honed axe. White shoes were easy enough to find, if ill-fitting, but I could not find any long white pants for love or money after a long time searching. Eventually I wandered through the women’s section, and found the closest thing available, an extra-large pair of stretchy white skinny jeans. And I was to wear them chopping alongside some of the world-class legends of the sport; joy. Mercifully, no photos exist of me in these.

Some world-class axemen

Pants aside, Saturday I bounced out of bed bright and excited. I set off to bike the 13 kilometres around the lake to get to the fairgrounds, and rolled in alongside throngs of other fairgoers in the morning sun. I had a bit of time to stretch and warm up, but it turned out that I was in not only the first event of the day, a 19” single-buck, but also in the first heat of that event. To top it off, I was on the stanchion next to Jason Wynyard!!! (Jason is a legend of woodchopping, has won the STIHL Timbersports Individual World Championship 13 times, and holds the world records for 12” V-chop (12.11 seconds) and 19” single buck (9.395 seconds)). Bevin was kind enough to let me carefully use his peg-and-raker, but rusty in practice skills as I was I did not have a very impressive time, especially next to Jason. Watching later heats, I noticed that kiwi woodsmen single buck at a much more aggressive angle than I am used to seeing in the US, with saws drawn back up to shoulder height for additional weight to be thrown behind the push. The stanchions we used were infinitesimally adjustable for height, being of the design of two sunk steel posts welded to a steel pegboard to which the rounds were screwed, and each sawyer would have their wedger help then adjust the round height to the centimetre before sawing.

Setting up the saw I'll use, on some of the blocks lined up for chopping

This meet was just as packed with activities as Spring Meet, with more than two dozen events over two days, and dozens of competitors with their families. Although there were only six disciplines (H-chop, V-chop, springboard, single buck, crosscut, and team relay), for most disciplines there were multiple events on different sizes of wood, for different classes of competitors, and many events had multiple heats feeding into a bracket to place winners. Like at North Haverhill, competitors entered each event individually (excepting the relay and crosscut) and paid a participation fee that funded the given prize pot. Most competitor entered many events each day, carefully calculating how much energy they could expend in any given chop. The participation fees ranged from free for the little kids, 5 or 10 NZD for the smaller events, to around 50 NZD for entering an (inter)national title. Additionally, for the non-title events kiwi woodsmen use a handicap system (handicaps are written down after each meet in the little books you purchase and hold on to). This makes events more interesting to watch by closing the range of finish times, and gives slower choppers a bit more of a chance. Usually handicaps are under 30 or 45 seconds, but for some of the really fast choppers I saw handicaps past a minute or two (the chap who won the NZ title in springboard had a full 3 minute handicap when he later participated in a normal springboard event).

My next event was an H-chop, and this time I drew the stand furthest away from the announcer’s booth. Bevin again loaned me an axe and a pair of chainmail socks, and away I went. The rounds had been randomly assigned, and I found one with ‘N. Friday’ pinned onto it on a green card (next to the round labeled J. Wynyard). An elderly axeman volunteering as a timer helped me chip out my footholds on the round timber as I put on the protective socks. I enthusiastically started chopping when I heard my handicap, and in my excitement soon lost track of my pattern. Bevin called out tips as I went, which I filed away to apply the next day. Unlike many of the axemen the sides of my V were not plane smooth, but I had loads of fun.

A block of wood with my name on it!

With my events over for the day, I alternated my afternoon between watching others chop and saw, and exploring the rest of the fair. There were several acres of fairgrounds packed with everything you’d expect to see at a 4H show. Stock were paraded around and judged on their appearances, from alpacas and sheep to cows and pigs and horses. 

I did not expect quite so many alpacas

Strong men lifted and flung and carried many heavy objects, and children ran around hitting each other with inflatable hammers. There were waterslides and carnival games, carriage rides and parades of antique cars. I followed a cool bagpipe and drum band around for a while, who were decked out in full kilted regalia. A whole tent was set up with woodcarvers selling their wares, with some of them carving knick-knacks with portable tools right there. I bought a beautiful kauri (Agathis australis) pen, turned not from a protected standing tree, but from wood that had sunk into a swamp many decades ago and been preserved. An adjacent exhibit showed artifacts of the history of logging, from old saws to a coal-powered small train engine that had been used to pull trees out of the forest along narrow tracks. The saws included several two-man chainsaws with a handle on the end of the bar, and even a coal powered engine that turned an arm that pushed and pulled a crosscut saw blade! 

A coal-powered crosscut saw

I wandered through the food tent zone and purchased a cone of ice cream freshly blended with berries of my choosing, and circled back around toward the woodchopping. The stage around the corner from the woodsmen’s field hosted a variety of events. On that first day there were competitions of Scottish and Irish dancing, performed by very serious young girls in plaid skirts and sailor suits respectively. The bagpipes of the musical accompaniment at 9 in the morning were a fun soundtrack for the first few chopping events, but after a few repeats of the song over the radio (I suppose it is most fair to have everyone compete on the same song and dance) it got a bit old.

The afternoon chopping events I came back to included springboard, which I had only seen live before in Tokoroa. Here they added another board level, and the blocks 12 feet in the air seemed to touch the sky on top of their poles. I was yet again amazed by how solid the wedges of the boards could be set into the notches only a handful of blows made in the poles, the speed at which axemen could swarm up and down, and the composure they could maintain doing a V-chop while balanced on a board 10 feet in the air. The way that day’s springboards went, every competitor had to set a trio of springboards curving up the side of the pole, chop one face of a V-chop at the top, then descend and repeat for the other side. One of the springboard events was the New Zealand title, and it was a nail-biter, coming down to only a few blows and a few seconds.

Spectacular springboard

Another set of events I made a point of catching were the specific women’s divisions. Most of the lumberjills competing were on the New Zealand national women’s team, the Axeferns. Recently I was shown an article, https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/female-competitive-woodchoppers-are-axing-gender-stereotypes, which took a lot of pictures and interviews at this meet. It was three of these Axeferns in Tokoroa who invited me to sit with them to watch the chopping and gave me the contact info of the Club to follow up on which led to me competing at the Rotorua meet. As with the broad field of axemen, there were competitors ranging from Mikhayla’s rising star at 21 to Sheree’s decorated experience at past 60, all serious competitors but free with the congratulations and advice once everyone’s block was chopped. Their finishing time order changed with each event, and most of them also entered and placed well in the gender-inclusive events as well.

Women's single buck: From left: Sheree, Darcell (newly married to Charles, her wedge-man), Alma, Mikhayla, and Kylea.

Yet another set of events of interest were the U-16 H-chops. Competitors ranged from ages 8 to 15, but all were serious and practiced. Smaller lumberjacks wielded shorter, but no less sharp, axes, and as exaggerated handicaps got to start with a bit of their 10” blocks already chopped out. One family had four kids in the group, all third-generation choppers, and the sibling rivalry meant that no quarter was given between the youngest son and daughter, ages 10 and 11 or so, golden ponytail vs. honey buzzcut as their axe-heads flashed in the sunshine.

U-16 H-chop, ages (from L) 8, 10, 9,  11, 13, 15

It was also hugely educational to watch all the axemen, especially those who made the finals in each event. Five out of the six members of the STIHL national team were there, as well as international competitors from Australia, England, and Wales (and, as the announcer delighted in announcing once I introduced myself, America!) No one is perfect, but these guys and gals came pretty close, with few a misplaced stroke and smooth rhythms born of grueling years of practice. There were axemen still competing in their 70’s, slow and steady, and I heard many stories from a man in his 80’s who had only retired from chopping the year before (and who lived along my way home from work). At some point in the afternoon I went and got a few autographs of Jason's to send to friends back in the States along with some Tuatahi stickers. I brought my Dartmouth lumberjacket to rep my woodchopping origins, but it was such a fine summer day that the wool was excessive.

Jason winning a chop

The second day of the Carnival was much like the first day. I again competed in a single-buck and an H-chop. Bevin was also competing in the latter, so I borrowed chainmail socks from Kyle Lemon, of the NZ national team, who came over to watch me, and as well as giving me tips invited me to come over to train with him. Instead of dancing next door there were sheep-shearing contests, with a flood of wooly sheep on one side of the building pouring out the other side pink and sheared. Being the second day there was also the most hyped event, a 15” world championship H-chop with a total prize pot of NZ$2400. This attracted all the best axemen to enter, and had a bit of a dark horse winner in the 18-year old brother of a national team member, whose time of 27.31 seconds shaved a full quarter second off the previous record (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysxd73f6o8s). The day finished off with the team relay race, which comprised of a single buck, a V-chop, an H-chop, another V-chop, another H-chop, and the massive ‘butcher’s block’. The ‘butcher’s block’ is a 2-man ~16” V-chop, with one axeman chopping each face in succession.

The team relay; note the butcher's block

After an exciting weekend, it was relaxing to clean up, piling the mountains of chopped blocks into a truck to be hauled away for firewood, and hearing the thud as we pushed over the unstrapped springboard poles. I am so glad I got to participate in this amazing bit of New Zealand culture and share this bit of my experience with you, my readers.

Kyle and Brathan pushing over a springboard pole

Wood Collecting for the Axemen's Carnival

My first practice with the Rotorua Axemen’s Club was quite similar to my first practice with the Dartmouth Woodsmen’s Team, if they each could be called practice, as they both consisted of collecting rounds to be chopped later. After a short delay, rooted in the effect an accent can have on relaying street names, I was picked up by the Club president, Bevin Cavey, and we met up with half a dozen other axemen of the Club. Thus gathered, we proceeded south in a caravan of pickup trucks (called ‘utes’ down there, for ‘utility vehicles’) and trailers. Our task? To retrieve some poplar logs kindly donated for the upcoming Axemen’s Carnival at the Agricultural and Pastoral (A&P) Show. The logs came from a no longer needed farm windbreak, which another Club member had felled and bucked the week before, and lay as they fell. We started by extracting, with hooks and rolling, the rounds we wanted from their entangling brush. The rounds were each marked with their tree of origin and order within the tree, to best match up the rounds for events.

Rolling the rounds out into the field for pick up through the neighboring paddock was a maze, avoiding the deposits made by the recently vacated cows. It made little difference for the bark, however. All of the rounds were of a more than adequate size, and some were even too big to fit in the lathe. Thus, we determined the range of sizes we needed, drew rough circles a few inches larger in radius than necessary, and split off the excess sides with axes and mauls. 

Rounds were rolled out of the brush and trimmed of excess mass

This was like an inverted giant dot split; chop everything outside of the line

We had enough rounds to fill every truck and trailer to overcapacity, and half of them had to make return trips. Bevin had been driving the tractor, piling the brush away from the logs, so he tossed me his keys to drive his truck out to the road. He was off to park the tractor before I could point out my inexperience, so I carefully drove across the field for my first and only time operating a manual transmission with my left hand. Back at the fairgrounds, where the meet would be held and we collected the wood, the club had a large lathe. One by one we loaded crude-split rounds into its jaws and set the proper stop points for the blade, and then the large gas engine started spinning them. Back and forth the blade moved across the log, sending showers of wood shavings like confetti arching up into the sky. 

With showers of shavings crude rounds are spun into blocks for chopping

Occasionally the blade would dig too deep and send a larger chunk of wood rocketing a dozen metres, but luckily no one was hit. In the end we had many dozens of rounds shaved into perfect cylinders, then packed in their own sawdust to keep then fresh and wet for the next week’s chopping. It took longer than expected, and I didn’t end up getting any competitive chopping or sawing practice, but it was still a great day. 

Amassed fresh blocks assembled at the fairgrounds

Whirinaki

Welcome back to my blog, noble readers! I have fallen quite behind in my journaling, but now that I am back in Hawai’i I will endeavor to catch you all up on my assorted adventures in tramping and woodchopping! This entry brings us all the way back to November, when I made contact with the Rotorua Tramping Club and went for the first non-solo backpacking trip of my time in New Zealand…

Whirinaki Te Pua-a-Tane Conservation Park is southwest of Rotorua, almost to the sea, home to one of the world’s last remaining prehistoric rainforests. After the decline of the native timber industry after extensive efforts by the Maori and conservationists to save what remained, many towns in the area likewise declined, although the infrastructure for tourism is increasing and breathing new life into communities. The Whirinaki Forest Park’s 136,000 acres is home to many miles of hiking trails, 32 miles of mountain bike track in two long loops, and 9 Department of Conservation (DOC) huts. The forest contains many remaining giant native podocarps that escaped the logging of days past. The native bush is also home to many native animals, such as the whio, or blue duck, and like many places in New Zealand there is an aggressive trapping campaign to lower the numbers of voracious alien pests like rats and stoats.

The Rotorua Tramping Club is one of the oldest of such on the North Island (I think trailing Auckland and Taranaki). They meet once monthly, and I caught their last meeting of the year. It started off with a Christmas trivia game; I started off strong with my knowledge of magi gifts and reindeer names, then quickly faded as the questions turned to Kiwi geography (that I now know a lot more about), finishing with about 16 out of a possible 69 points. I was runner up for the booby prize, won by an Italian exchange student I would get to know on the upcoming hike. The RTC seemed a lot like the AMC groups I have met, largely middle-aged and retired folk who had a propensity for scheduling hikes and activities during working days. However, their penultimate tramping of the year (their ultimate tramp in the Kaimanawa Ranges conflicted with attending the Tokoroa Axemens Carnival) fit nicely into a weekend I had free.

I was picked up Saturday morning by the club president, a snowy-bearded gentleman originally from Scotland. As we drove out toward Whirinaki, along the same road I took to work in Kaingaroa, we talked about tramping around the world and how Kiwi tramping compares to that in the States. He said that he is in competition with his son as to who can visit the most DOC huts. He has a head start with his years, and has bagged a few that his son will never see, as the DOC loses a few of their over 950 huts every year to fire and new ones are constantly being built elsewhere to replace them. The rest of the group arrived at Whirinaki a few minutes after we did, and the five of us piled into the 4WD van of the local shuttle service to the trailhead.

Our objective for the trip was Central Whirinaki Hut, a relaxed XXX miles up the trail. The trail started with an informational board explaining the significance of the native podocarp forest we were entering, some of the largest species of native trees, whose populations have been decimated by logging in most places. We passed many such podocarps, the first few with small identification signs. Three members of our group were retirees and set the leisurely pace. The fourth group member was an exchange student from Italy named Sergio. Sergio was from a small city in the North, and quite conversational about his home region, hiking in the Alps, land access, bits of Italian vocabulary, and how confusing English names were when he first got here.

We pushed on, and shortly after came out into a clearing of tall grass and wildflowers, with a shelter and picnic table to stop at for lunch. The shelter was far beyond my expectations. I had an image in my mind of the classic 3-sided shelter from Dartmouth’s AT stretch, but an open front was about where the similarities between the two stopped. This shelter had a counter in the center of a 200 square foot floor plan, complete with sinks with running water from a rooftop catchment water system. A woodstove sat in the offset corrugated iron chimney box, along with an axe by a pile of firewood and a set of pots. Four bunks, complete with mattresses, lined the walls to complete thus quasi-cabin.

For most of the remainder of the hike the trail followed the river, albeit carved into the bank 20 feet above the water. In a few locations the steep bank had given away in a slip, and the temporary reroutes involved short, steep climbs up to go over the tops of the slide footprints. Otherwise the trail was wide, flat and smooth enough that I could have happily biked along it; at one point shortly before the hut a tunnel cut straight through a ridge rather than climbing an extra 15 feet. As well as all the markers for stoat traps, and the orange triangles nailed to trees that serve the same purpose as white blazes, I noticed other periodic markers, with sequentially rising numbers. One of my guesses was that these were marking the percent of the way we were to the hut, which seemed to be supported when we hit 100 right before rounding the corner to see the hut, but I lost track of them on the return hike and couldn’t verify their beginning number and location.

As for the hut! This was the first DOC hut I had been to, and I had high hopes based on the quality of their mere shelters. The hut had what I would later find to be a standard layout, two bunkrooms to sleep 25, and a large common area with a woodstove and food preparation areas. Cut off by an internal wall was the locked warden’s quarters, where he or she would stay when making a periodic visit for monitoring or maintenance. All this for only NZ$10/person (US$6)! Our party was the only one there that night, but I decided to stick with my original plan (and save NZ$5) and camp out, given I had packed my hammock set-up. There were ample trees nearby, halfway to the familiar stream, which now burbled merrily in riffles and was home to a remaining population of the whio (blue duck).

On Sunday we bid goodbye to my original ride, who was taking an additional two days to complete the full circuit (if only I had the time), and packed up to retrace our steps. About two miles from the end three of us elected to walk the other side of a loop track that covered some new terrain and small waterfalls. Our shuttle had not yet arrived, so we set down our packs to wait at the trailhead benches. Up until this time Sergio had done a better job than I had in sticking to the group pace rather than distractedly hiking faster, demonstrating youthful spryness mostly only in clambering over the landslides. I was happy with the hiking we had done so far, but Sergio apparently had a bunch of bottled up energy and pointed out that there was a short trail to a notable waterfall that left from the same trailhead we were at. Ever game for a challenge and extra scenic points, I agreed with him that the prescribed 45-minute round trip could be done in the 20 we had until the shuttle’s scheduled arrival, if we ran. Sergio had been hiking in trail running shoes, I in full hiking boots, and I was out of breath after we went up and down several small valleys on the mile to the waterfall. The falls made it worth it though, as they were pleasingly tumultuous and voluminous. There was a pool at the base, much like the one I would visit later on the Kepler Track at Iris Burns, and we took a short, frigid swim before jogging back to meet the shuttle on time. 

A very fancy shelter!

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.