GEORGE BRILL

THE HOLLYFORD LOOP

 

A birthday tradition fulfilled; two days of river wading and bushwhacking; and a newfound respect for a land the mix of European Alps, Malaysian jungle, Scandinavian coastline and the best of British bogland.

 

Perhaps not a relaxing birthday, but certainly one to remember. What began as a casual hike around the Skippers Mountains of northern Fiordland became a 41-hour epic of bushwhacking and swamp crawling. When sea meets mountain meets rainforest and the very land around seems to stand in indifferent resistance to your passing: neck deep river crossings, endless lost trails and trackless forest thickets, torn clothes and skin, blisters, chafing, literally hundreds of climbs over and under fallen trees and around landslides, chest-deep sucking flax marshes, sandflies, torch-lit lake wading, and a final hobbling sprint to escape an angry sea-lion.

 

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It’s the beginning of 2020 and I find myself working at a small wilderness lodge in the remote backcountry of far northern Fiordland, the largest and wildest of New Zealand’s National Parks. Four days walk from the nearest road, and realistically accessible only by helicopter and, on a good day, a long boat ride, the lodge—Awarua Guides—is the life’s work of Warrick Mitchell, and the current iteration in a long history of bushmen, deer hunters and pioneers. Having lived on the land for generations, the Mitchell family had seen and orchestrated the golden days of the Chopper Boys: men of incredible courage and lack of bearing for self-preservation who would launch themselves from airborne helicopters onto the antlers of galloping stags in an effort to capture the invasive deer live for the farms inland. Now covertly famous for its world-class, yet utterly empty, surf-breaks, Warrick shares this incredible locale with an eclectic mix of up-market tourists and pro-surfer guests: a wilderness experience like no other.

 

I had contacted Warrick through a mutual friend and, after a short email exchange, found myself there a couple of months later working as a general hand alongside the two other young misfits Warrick had taken in. And so it was, through deer hunting, fishing, surfing and trail blazing, that we explored the wilderness of Big Bay—the Awarua. 

 

For the intrepid of the New Zealand trampers, there is a well-known track—the Hollyford Track—that ventures from the south, down the Hollyford River valley, to end at the bay around the headland from Big Bay—Martin’s Bay. From there the adventurous may embark on the Pyke-Big Bay Route—note ‘route’, not ‘track’—that follows the headland around Long Reef Point, before crossing Big Bay and delving up toward the Pyke River, eventually to return down its mighty valley to the Hollyford Track far inland. All told, a complete circumnavigation of the Skippers Mountain Range of northern Fiordland. What better way to spend my birthday?

 

Fiordland. The Shadow Lands. The mountains of temperate rainforest, where sea meets mountain meets jungle. It is a place known for its incredible lushness and mist-enshrouded forests. And there’s good reason for that. It rains here. A lot. Fiordland receives anywhere from seven to ten meters of rain annually. That’s three times the rainfall of the wettest of western Scotland. It’s wet. In the air. On the ground. Everywhere. Rivers flood without warning, landslides tear through the forests, and an extensive network of swamps constitute a major portion of the valley floors.

 

About a week and a half before I set out, we received a pretty spectacular storm. The heaviest rainfall, as it turned out, to have hit the region in over 20 years; over a meter of rainfall in just 48 hours. Hunkered down in our plywood lodge we loved it, venturing out for a long run on trails-turned-rivers before returning home to pass the wettest couple of days in the company of a roaring fire and bottle of malt whiskey. 

 

Beyond our own isolated world, the storm had been a pretty big deal, causing major damage across the region. Both the Hollyford and Milford roads were shut until further notice, and both the Hollyford Track and the Pyke-Big Bay route were officially closed until further notice on account of flooding and landslides. Of course, we only found out about all this afterwards...

 

On flying out at the end of my stay, about a month later and a couple of weeks after my hike, we saw the destruction from the air, still very much a reality. Landslips and fallen trees filled the mountainsides (as I could attest to…) and the Hollyford Road further down the valley had been destroyed by river erosion and landslips from above.

 

That said, despite the storm and the many diversions, landslips, fallen trees, destroyed tracks and plentiful frustrating hours of lost trails to come, as the storm passed on the weather became clear: a sunny sky, rivers dropping low and clear, and light winds sufficient to deter the worst of the dreaded sandflies. Indeed, I aimed to fit the hike into a short spell of fine weather, setting out on the 14th for a couple of days of beautiful forecasts in advance of a new storm front set to arrive on the afternoon of the 16th. I had my window.

 

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Day 1 | The Pathlessness of the Pyke

 

Bag packed with a sleeping bag, some snacks, and large Tupperware of venison stew curtesy of Warrick, I stepped onto the trail at 6am. The flax loomed high in the darkness and the moon cast a silvery light across the sand flats of the bay. I crossed the plank over the small stream and passed the orange marker at the entrance to the Pyke track.

 

I knew the trail well. I’d spent the last three weeks building boulder bridges and ramps of rock at every wash-out and new creek, cutting new trails where paths had collapsed in the storm. It’s a good track, large enough for a quadbike and I made fast progress, reaching the dry Awarua river as the sun began to rise beyond the valley. I took a slight wrong turn just before the Pyke itself, meeting the Paulin Creek slip higher up than planned and following to the intersection southwards. Giant tree-ferns ringed the gravel beds and many deer wandered off before me as I made my way down.

 

I reached the Pyke River soon after sunrise, the mountains in the mist beyond framing the rainforest canopies that stretched across the valley. Before me lay a clearing of yellow-tinted flax-land. The Garden of Eden the local bushmen called it, and its beauty betrayed the name. A thousand knife blades glinted in the low morning sun, set beside a slow-winding ribbon of many-coloured pebbles. I crossed the clear water in two sections without problem—it was low, knee high at most and slow-flowing—and paused for breakfast on the far bank. Oats and milk powder with fresh cold river water before the sandflies chased me onward.

 

The riverbank led me to an area of tussocked rocky ground, before openness gave way to thick flax bogs. Unable to find the trail markers I mentally-fixed my direction and started in, pushing and tunnelling through the green blades that stretched far overhead. I could see little and at times I had to tunnel through narrow gaps on my knees, but within half an hour I’d found my way to what seemed to be a trail. That in turn disappeared, only to be found and lost again many times. Occasionally I’d see the triangular trail markers, but they were scant and hard to follow—if any real trail even existed. I’d fast discover that this was to become the theme of the day, and it soon became clear that finding orange markers amidst Fiordland’s verdant sea of bush was nigh on impossible with the added handicap of red-green colour blindness.

 

And so the early hours stretched into late morning, and the pattern remained the same. Deep in the forests around the Pyke’s east bank I would lose and find the trail, relying on deer trods and what intuitive sense of direction I could muster. I couldn’t go that wrong—I walked a bog-jungle strip but a kilometre or two wide, beyond which the valley floor stretched abruptly skyward on either side, and many times the mountain wall emerged from the forest to my left to turn me back southward. At around 11am I watched a helicopter fly up the valley overhead: the latest guests destined for the Lodge at Big Bay.

 

Often even the deer trails ran out, and I would find myself clawing and wriggling through thick brush, oftentimes emerging on an unexpected bog or tributary. A couple of times I had to climb down steep banks and cross with backpack on head, wading up to my neck in the clear water. The streams were cold and refreshing in the late morning’s heat and I drank greedily. Immersion seemed to reawaken and strengthen; the sun dried my clothes within minutes.

 

I made a navigational error in mistaking a pool for the river through the trees and spent a good hour struggling on the mountainsides to the east, climbing up and crawling down vertical scrub slopes around the base of the mountains. After a painful fall trying to cross a fallen tree amid tangled creepers, I slid-climbed my way back to the riverbank and sat in the sun on a gravel bar. Venison stew in the cradle of a mountain wilderness is hard to best. 

 

Back into the bush, sometimes breaking into a trot on paths that allowed it, but more frequently wriggling through the clutches of pathless forest, moss-covered pits and rock-strewn ground. I passed Lake Wilmot and headed on, many times emerging onto sun-soaked slips of white rock and battered tree-trunks: the deep scars of storm-swollen floods from the month before. I could see how serious the flooding had been. Rivers had torn through the forests, ten meters or more above their normal levels. I was lucky: the valley was entirely, indisputably impassable in bad weather

 

My thoughts were compounded at the Olivine Hut, where after another chest deep river crossing and a rusty old cableway that required far more effort to winch myself across than expected, I found the building devastated: beds thrown against the walls and criss-crossed tracks of mouse paws across a floor of deep silt. Clearly it had been hit hard, even on its perch a good five metres above the now dormant riverbed below. I paused a few minutes and dried my feet in the sun, finishing the last of my gourmet stew.

 

From the hut led a good path. At least, I guess it continued as such. I lost its orange triangles once again less than half an hour later, instead entering the deepest thicket yet. The flood had broken the trees, and I tried to climb atop the mess of branches and trunks, only to fall through into the tangled mess below and resort to a belly crawl for the next hundred meters. My legs stung raw with bloody scratches from thigh to ankle and the scrub ripped at my shirt and pack, clawing holes in the fabric and tearing at the skin beneath. 

 

Finally, I emerged onto a massive slip, only to spend half an hour searching for a trail on the other side. Incredibly I found it, and, entering the open fields beyond, I came to the Black Swamp. I’d been dreading it from the beginning, and each new extremity of difficulty I’d encountered thus far had enlarged its reputation in my mind. It didn’t disappoint. It stands firmly as the most extreme section of ‘trail’ I have walked to this day. Chest deep in places, I half-waded, half-swam through the swallowing liquid blackness that wound in deep runnels between the impenetrable flax stands. I slipped and fell, losing my map to the mud below, forcing on in sheer disbelief as I found yet more orange triangles, standing proud on sticks protruding from the muck. This was indeed, unbelievably, the track.

 

Finally, as it began to grow dark, I emerged into a thick forest, running, wriggling and wading with abandon between the trees, heading on an intuitive bearing in a last-ditch hope to reach the valley’s end before dark. I emerged into open fields as the sun began to fall, and half an hour later stood on the northern bank of Lake Alabaster: one final hurdle before the hut. 

 

The steep mountainside on the lake’s eastern shore meant that the only passage was to wade knee deep along its edge, but at least it gave me clear direction as dusk fell. Three and a half miles of underwater boulders, reed thickets, and a thousand fallen trees. Yet I was content, and as a magnificent sunset cast its reflection across the glassy water I paused a moment to take it in. The glowing eyes of possums stared back at me from the bank as I continued for an hour by headtorch, climbing and ducking through the fallen skeletons of bark-clad giants. At the end of the lake I hunted for the hut in the darkness, finding it at last a set a little back from the water’s edge: deserted yet homely. I settled in for the night, gorging and watering myself before falling at once into a deep sleep.

 

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Day 2 | Of Demons and Chafing

 

The next morning I woke leisurely, repacking my kit and preparing a breakfast of oats, dates and peanuts. I found the hut logbook and wrote myself a birthday message below an ominous previous entry: a warning from a warden to trampers coming from the south that the track beyond—that which I’d walked yesterday—was impassable and closed. The last entry before that dated back to mid-January. I guess I must have been the first to pass since then.

 

I was out the door by 8:30am and down the manicured trail to the suspension bridge at Alabaster’s base. From there the Demon Trail stretched before me, and at first I made good time, running the flatter sections. Soon though it became more technical, and rocky ground gave way to boulders and steep trails of cascading water. But it was an actual trail, clear and well-marked, and so I was happy.

 

Passing the turning for the McKerrow Island Hut I had to take a short detour through the trees where the path had fallen away to the widening waters of the Hollyford forty feet below. From there the trail became more challenging: endless ups and downs and fallen trees lying across its rocky passage. The path continued much the same all morning and into the afternoon, past the Demon Trail Hut and then Hokuri three hours beyond. At each I took a brief respite, cleaning my feet and taking ten minutes to eat and wonder at the incredible views to the lake below.

 

Blisters and chafing were coming on badly now; my feet were incessantly wet, and sand, foliage, and mud filled my socks however many times I emptied them. I lost time searching for the path at a couple of larger slips and in one hopeless circling up and down a steep creek bank where it kinked unexpectedly beneath a major treefall. By now I must have clambered over more than a few hundred of these blockages. The Demon Trail rose high one last time in parting spite and then down to the lake and a fording of Hokuri Creek—thankfully low and easy.

 

I made up good time along the rocky beach of Lake McKerrow, past the silent ruins of abandoned Jamestown, and onto the track that dove back inland. There I came across the best trail yet—a wide single-track of mounded gravel through the tree-ferns—and I ate up ground, three miles an hour and faster. The blue conservation markers at Martin’s Bay Airstrip threw me off, and after ten minutes of circling amongst the rabbits I saw a sign that instructed the tramper not to follow them, helpfully placed at the far end of the field.

 

Then it was up and over the dunes to the shore behind the Hollyford Bar, deep in a single-minded focus to push aside the pain of raw thighs rubbing on wet shorts. The chafing was numbingly painful by now, my blisters less bothering. It is a funny thing about pain, that what previously occupied the mind sits quiet in the presence of novel agonies of greater relative cruelty.

 

The dunes undulated wildly, through forest and over beach. The trail wound ahead well-defined, but several vast washouts meant near vertical gullies to climbs in and out of, sometimes in excess of five metres deep. A final unnervingly high balance across a fallen tree led me to the edge of the lake outlet, where I turned and stood in reverent wonder. Behind me stretched the Bar, and beyond that the vast magnificence of the Hollyford Valley. It was quite a sight—mountains, sea, forest and lake—the stuff of verse and classic literature: New Zealand’s natural wealth at its best.

 

A little further on I came to the Martins Bay Hut. It compelled me to unpack and stay the night, and as I took some minutes to eat a bag of oats I struggled mentally between comfort and ambition. So far that day I had covered 23 miles: not yet the 24 that my years demanded. Yet if I headed on I knew I wouldn’t reach journey’s end until almost midnight. Eventually my mind swung back to the inevitable, taking note as I left of the warning that hung by the door to avoid the beach beyond Long Reef Point at high tide. It was of course just past high tide.

 

I crossed the spur of Long Reef Point with a feeling that it stood at the ends of the earth, jutting out into a darkening ocean around and beyond. Resentfully I began boulder hopping, climbing up and over car-sized monoliths in the narrow strip of land between flax-thicket and ocean.

 

In a sudden flurry of motion and fury, a large brown shape lurched from between the flax stands above me to my right, flapping and pounding toward me across the rocks. The sea lion forced a painful stumble-run, pursuing me long beyond her nest. Satisfied with her scare she waddled back home, but I carried a stone thereafter and edged carefully round corners glancing up nervously to the flax.

 

The boulders seemed to last forever, and darkness fell in a golden display on the mountainous inlet before me. I took a brief stop as it edged to full dark, digging out my headlamp and refilling from the trickle of water that straddled the beach. Then, as the beach grew thin, I finally reached the path I knew and strode ankle deep in the waterlogged track toward McKenzie’s Creek, accompanied by glowing eyes of deer and rabbit that slid in and out of sight.

 

Overshooting slightly, I made my way back to the beach, where low tide afforded me hard, flat sand below the pebbles. I walked fast, in denial of pain and fatigue, counting steps in the blackness that engulfed me. The world shrank to thought and footfall: entombed by the dark vastness beyond.

 

Shaking off sleep and drifting eyelids as I marched, I concentrated on the painful numbness of my thighs: fearful to look at the bloody mess I was sure they would be. Suddenly in trancelike awakening I became aware of quadbike tracks below my feet. Someone had been out to look for me: Warrick as I later found out had attempted to intercept me, following my tracker from Long Reef Point. 

 

2600—or 2700: I wasn’t sure—steps later I headed up the beach to hit Big Bay Hut from which a short walk between the flaxes revealed the twinkling lights of Awarua Camp across the water. They’d left the rowing boat on this side of the river, but I had finish on foot, had to close the loop the way I’d begun. I waded into the black water, backpack on head one last time, in a final effort of triumph in the night. I emerged to Geo and Carly lighting my face with their headlamps, stepping the final few feet to the path where I’d taken my first step the morning before. I was spent entirely.

 

Company and conversation were warmly appreciated after the two days of solitude, and I was presented a birthday dinner to be envied: a plate of rice piled high with freshly shot venison stew and sausages, seated beside a fire roaring in the burner, Warrick’s cabin a true haven of comfort amidst the wilderness. I was too tired to eat and couldn’t stomach more than a mouthful, but after a fire heated shower I returned and demolished the plate in its entirety. I slept deeply that night, my pain drowned in dreams of New Zealand’s wild beauty: of tribute to suffering and resilience, the chopper boys and pioneers past; to freedom and the wildness of the human spirit; and to the ephemeral Bruce in his little hut, set amid the remote mountainsides that cradle Lake Wilmot.