Finding Your Path
We cross the Garnock Burn wearing sandals, breaking my ‘Don’t take your boots off crossing a river when tramping,’ rule. My excuse is that the river is no more than calf deep, slow flowing and clear. And I don’t want wet socks and boots for the thirteen hundred metre climb on the other side of the river to reach the top of Mount Titiroa.
Mount Titiroa is a very obvious peak in Fiordland, given the white granite boulders cladding its upper slopes. It looks snow-covered all year round. Titiroa sits in the Hunter Mountains, across the Waiau River from Manapouri township. It has been on our radar to climb for a while and, when a weather window appeared in the forecast, we seized the opportunity. Fiordland doesn’t always have fine weather.
We had walked for a couple of hours on a track from Hope Arm Hut on Lake Manapouri to reach the Garnock Burn, climbing over and around fallen trees in the old growth beech and podocarp forest. On the other side of the Garnock Burn there is no track. As we walk into the bush I feel like I’m going home.
There are people who primarily want to do things with other people and people who want to do things where there aren’t other people. Nature? Nurture? Impossible to tell. Living in a tourist destination could be a driver to want to escape the seething throngs. However, I’ve loved being in the bush and mountains since I was a small child (not particularly encouraged by a family whose idea of a pleasant holiday was definitely not tramping or camping).
I couldn’t wait to be allowed to go tramping at high school – not until I was fifteen. My first tramping trip was over Goat Pass in Arthurs Pass led by Anne Braun-Elwert and we met up ion the Deception Valley with her partner Gottleib Braun-Elwert and his bunch of Linwood High School Boys. Gottleib later became a well-known NZ mountain guide and was Helen Clark’s guide of choice. No shenanigans between boys and girls on that trip –-Our tent camp was deluged with rain, we had to retreat up the Deception River to Goat Pass Hut, one of the girls got hypothermia in the process, we were stuck at the hut for three days, I wanted to do it again.
In 1985 I got to spend the summer in the bush south of Haast doing vegetation surveys. We traversed through South Westland jungle, following the lines on the inch to the mile map grids. There weren’t lines on the ground, of course. We used compasses, large altimeters, aerial photos and maps to navigate through sphagnum swamps that sucked your boots off, kiekie vines that piled up metres high, bush lawyer that snagged your clothing, tannin-stained streams lined with flax in which eels might swim. We could always find our way back because we used hip-chains, a device worn on a belt that allowed cotton to reel out behind you through a counter informing you on the number of metres you had travelled. Rather than a trail of crumbs, you had a cotton string along which to run your finger as you returned to the camp for the night.
I learned many things that summer in Haast, not the least of which was to be comfortable in untracked bush whether leading a group or on my own. By summer’s end I could easily navigate using the sun and the slope of the land. It’s like riding a bicycle, a feeling that you don’t lose and don’t want to lose.
Climbing through the forest towards Titiroa feels right. We avoid dense patches of tree fall and head up the side of creeklets that incise into the slope. We skirt around small bluffs, having deliberately taken a line to the right of large bluffs towering above the river. Obvious routes appear through the vegetation and we follow them – more likely deer tracks than from human footfalls. We gain nearly four hundred metres of elevation in around six hundred metres of horizontal distance to a broad ridge along which there are many tracks through a tangle of trees and shrubs.
Chris and I have an energetic debate at this point. “Which is the track?” he says.
“None of them is ‘the’ track,” I say. “They are all ‘a track’. We just need to find the best track to get us above the bush line further along the ridge.”
“I know that,” he says.
Once we climb above the bush line life couldn’t be better. The weather is stunningly blue, still and cool. To walk up a ridge without a breath of wind is a treasure. We stomp up sandy slopes derived from crystals shedding of rounded granite boulders, having lunch on the way.
We reach a shallow tarn where we stash our packs and can see the summit above us.
We climb the last three hundred metres to the peak at 1715m and views of Lakes Manapouri, Te Anau, Monowai. We can see Tutoko, Pikirakatahi - Mount Earnslaw, Tititea - Mount Aspiring and, we think, Aoraki - Mount Cook.
There’s a loveliness of black-spotted red ladybirds living in a tiny scoop on top of the summit rock.
Below us we can see our tarn and a much better tarn further south to which we descend. It has granite sand beaches with a dark blue centre in which the water is a shock compared to the temperate edge.
We stroll back down to Duffy Tarn, as we name it, on the basis that it is no more than knee deep compared to our deeper-than-you-can-see swimming spot. We traverse through Duffy Ridge, Duffy Creek, Duffy Swamp to Duffy Rocks where we put up our tent and make a cup of tea.
Chris goes for a wander to Duffy Creek and I drink my tea and listen. To listen requires being quiet. Then you can hear the quiet. Which is never quiet. I hear high squeaks of birds that hop and swoop around our camp site. And I hear the mountain air. It sounds like tiny icicles clinking against each other as they fall from the sky, high above. I hold that quiet.
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