West Coast Tour

My first projects include upgrading a few small campgrounds in the Greymouth area. As I discussed in the previous post, upgrading campgrounds to the new standards (just approved last week) is new to DOC. As part of my orientation to see what types of features, facilities and amenities are offered at other campsites, I took a trip to see several other DOC campgrounds from Greymouth all the way south to Haast Pass.

Sunrise in the Haast valley, heading east into the Pass.

All I can say is – Wow. New Zealand deserves its reputation as a stunningly beautiful country.

Sun setting over Ship Creek.

While I won’t bore you with the photos I took of picnic tables, toilets, retaining walls and fee stations, I do have some photos of the scenery that I’d like to share. Here are a few of the lakes where you can stay in one of DOC's campgrounds.

Lake Mapourika has two campgrounds and several boat ramps.
The campgrounds are set to be upgraded (by someone else,
as they're in a different district) in the next year or so.

Lake Ianthe has a cozy little campground that invites you to stay for days.

Special thanks go out to all of my friends at PP&R who blessed me with a nice pair of binoculars (my old ones never seemed to line up properly, so these are great). Ron, you picked the right pair. Thanks!

So, for the bird nerds in the crowd, I saw a few fun birds on my driving tour of the coast. I have pictures of the brilliant environs in which they live, but sorry - no photos of the birds themselves. For those, click here.

Along the shores of Lake Ianthe, I saw many Tomtits and Fantails, as well as a pair of Black Swans. Further down the coast, while enjoying the alpenglow of sunset wash over the mountains, I heard the shrill cries of the rather uncommon Variable Oystercatchers as they ran in and out with the tide.

View of the Southern Alps from Haast Beach.

Driving the coast road, I wound my way from one valley to the next, crossing creeks that spilled out of the native bush, which covers the flanks of the mountains.

A view into the NZ bush, or temperate zone rain forest,
near Lake Matheson and Fox Glacier.

On the shelf of flatlands between the mountains and the sea were farms, sprinkled with sheep, cows, and one of New Zealand’s odd-looking native birds, the Pukeko, or Purple Swamphen.

A bit of farmland at the foot of the mountains,
graced with a rainbow.

The largest of the tourist attractions along the drive are the two glaciers - Fox and Franz Josef, which are some of the only glaciers still advancing anywhere on Earth. Nearly 500,000 visitors a year come to see the glaciers, crowding the small villages that serve them. As part of my training, I spent a day being introduced to the art of trail building from one of the masters.

View of Fox Glacier in the mist.

Regardless of the traffic on the coast road, one is forced to practice good manners while driving, as the 200 mile stretch from Greymouth to Haast features nearly 30 one-lane bridges, including the longest in the country, featuring two turn out bays to allow passing.

The entrance to one of the shorter one lane bridges.

I found that crossing these bridges was not a problem, as the scenery along the road inspires patience. Tempted to come visit, yet?

More another day.

Bryan

The Cave Creek Tragedy

There is something that lies in the collective psyche of everyone I work with, of everyone who works for the Department of Conservation (DOC). It shapes the way DOC operates, the way people view their work, the way safety consciousness permeates the agency. I speak of the memory of Cave Creek, a national tragedy that took place in 1995 at Paparoa National Park, just up the road from where I now work. Fourteen people – 13 Outdoor Recreation students and a DOC employee – died with the collapse of a viewing platform hanging out over a cliff overlooking Cave Creek.

Several of the people I work with worked for DOC then and nearly everyone knows someone affected directly by the disaster. In a country where any murder or kidnapping makes national headlines, the scope of this tragedy was huge - leaving the name Cave Creek in everyone's memory.

Even before I arrived here to begin my new job, I’d heard about Cave Creek several times. One of the managers from Portland Parks & Recreation – originally from Australia – had been part of an international group of park managers reviewing what had happened to help learn the lessons of Cave Creek. I heard more about it over dinner with my boss my first night in country, and again over beers with my new co-workers the Friday before I started work. It’s not a raw memory shared with tears, but it’s definitely high in the collective conscious.

Acting on the lessons learned DOC developed a comprehensive system of managing all the ‘visitor assets’ throughout the country, ranging from more rigorous inventorying and inspection for safety, to standardising features. Every bridge, sign, kiosk, platform, toilet, hut, raised walkway – every single human-built structure has been inventoried, tagged and evaluated to determine its condition and its lifespan. Each is regularly inspected by staff, as well as checked by a DOC engineer.

Beyond the engineered structures, standards were developed for assets such as tracks (trails), campsites and huts, based on studies of the people using them and the services they might expect. For example there are three categories of campground: basic, standard or serviced, each with its own set of standards that must be met. The variety of types of tracks is wider, ranging from short stop walks to unmaintained backcountry routes with markers every 50 metres. All of these have been inventoried, assigned a certain category, and are slowly being brought up to the new standards. Most have been minimally maintained all along, but many have suffered from some neglect, as attention was paid to inventorying and maintaining the built structures.

Now, new money has been set aside to upgrade some of the areas that have been neglected for some time. It is to help with planning and implementing projects such as these that I was hired.

Here are a few websites that discuss the details of Cave Creek:

The DOC website.

The Christchurch Library’s website.

Life in a small town

I've lived in my share of small towns before now. Point Reyes Station, Bolinas, Port Angeles, and Denali Park all come to mind. But somehow in each of those it was different. Perhaps because I was seasonal, I didn’t get to know people so well that I started recognizing folks as I bumped into them from one place to the next.

During my first week here, I had a nice long talk with the folks at the local paper, as I was putting my ad in the classifieds, trying to find myself a flat. One of them called me back as soon as they’d taken an ad for a flat available, before it ran in the next day’s paper, just to be helpful. Then I ran into her at a store later that day, where she asked me if I’d seen the place yet and if it had worked out. (I had. It hadn’t.)

The property manager dealing with rentals told me her colleague was moving to Oz (Australia), and I should see if she had any furniture for sale. When I spoke to her colleague, Lisa, she told me her family had all claimed things. Later that weekend, as I was poking through things at a garage sale, Lisa came out of the kitchen to say hi – having recognized my voice…

These sorts of things happen every day. Pretty soon, I’ll know everyone, and they’ll all know me. A curse and a blessing, I suppose.

Have you ever stayed sitting in your car for a bit, to hear the end of a story, or a song you like? No need for that here. The local radio station stitches us all together with a musical thread winding in and out of shops, homes, and cars throughout the coast. There are other radio stations, but only one local to the west coast. Lucky for me, it’s music I enjoy, so it’s playing in my car as I drive around town. As I leave the car to go into the video store, it’s playing in there, so I hardly miss a beat, or a news story. As I walk next door to the dairy (read bakery/café), it’s playing in there as well. The same goes for the gas station, grocery store and just about every where else.

One of my favorite things about the small town – or perhaps its just New Zealand, but I find that hard to imagine – is the level of trust for everyone. When I was looking at cars to buy, each of the dealers in town let me take out cars for a test drive, without so much as looking at my license, or any ID. “I work at the local DOC office.” “Ok, good as gold, mate.” They know where to find me. When I was unsure about buying the Subaru, they let me take it for the weekend, see if I liked it, have it looked over by a mechanic. No money or ID changed hands (though I had already dropped nearly $600 renting a car from them for two weeks). I took it to ChCh (Christchurch) for the weekend, and they were fine with that. Then when I wasn’t able to muster all the cash right away, they signed the car over to me anyhow, and said come back in a few days when I had the cash. “No worries mate. Good as gold.” And so it was.

The same goes for the smaller shops. I was looking at some pillows for my new couch the other day, but wasn’t sure which ones to get. The store told me to take all three sets home, see what I thought, and bring back the ones I didn’t want. They wrote down what I took, the prices, and my phone number, gave me their business card and let me walk out the door.

While it may all seem like Andy Griffith-land here, I should tell you DOC (or the Department of Conservation, where I work) has been the victim of theft twice in the last week. Last week someone broke into one of our camping lodges and stole the hot water heater and our washing machine. Then over this past weekend someone stole the tractor we’ve had parked for weeks at the foot of a trail we’re upgrading. Seems hard to imagine someone can go about using that locally without explaining where they got a new tractor… We’ll see if it turns up.

Settling in

I flew across the Soupthern Alps from Christchurch as the final leg of my 26 hour journey from LAX to my new home. My boss had found me temporary accomodation here in a local guest house, catering mostly to hospital staff and a few others. It's been a good landing spot, but it isn't where I want to stay for too long. I want my own space, so as soon as I arrived I began looking for a place to live. Greymouth is the biggest town on the coast, and it is somewhat of a booming town, with new mines opening in the hills nearby. So the housing market is tight. I've seen many places over the past few weeks, some pretty remarkable, some remarkably not pretty. But patience and persistence paid off, and I'm moving into my own place this week.

So yesterday I drove over the hill, from Greymouth to Christchurch, through Arthur's Pass, one of only 3 ways through the Southern Alps, crossing from the west coast through the Canterbury plains to the south island's biggest city. Another way across, Lewis Pass, is within my office's jurisdiction. There's a campground and trailhead there that I'll be working on in the next few months. But more on that later.

Arthur's Pass is a National Park, and justifiably so. It was stunning. It was hard to stay focused on my mission to Christchurch - to visit the used car lots and see if the '93 Subaru I was driving was the deal I thought it was. In the end it was, and I've bought it.

But along the way I had to stop to take a few photos, as so many of you have been telling me I needed to do so I could prove that the rumors were true: that my move to NZ was not a fools errand, but an inspired life choice. I hope it was.

Here's some of why I think so... A small pond frozen over at the summit of Arthur's Pass. This place begged me to get out and hike... But it will have to wait for another day. For I had to continue on to the big city of Christchurch (300,000) to check out the car yards, and furniture stores...

More another day.

Bryan

Getting started with this blog

So I don't really know what I'm doing here in terms of making a blog, yet... But I have wanted to share some stories and some photos with folks since I've arrived here, so I'm jumping in.

So before I get to the photos, here's a bit of an update on how things are going. I must admit that picking up my life and moving to somewhere I've only been to once when I passed through the train station is a bigger deal than I'd really anticipated. There's the usual stuff with getting started in a new place. Finding a new place to live, anew car, filling my new home with everything from plants to a bed to silverware... I brought very little.

Then there's moving to a place where no one has known me any longer than the day I got off the plane. And then there's learning the new language. True - they speak English here. But I forgot how different their accent and the local idioms can be. I sit around during smokoh (our twice daily coffee/tea break) and find myself as lost as if folks were speaking Portuguese, at times. I suppose they find my accent as hard to understand as I do theirs, but as some have pointed out, they've got the advantage of having grown up listening to American TV and movies, so at least they're somewhat familiar with my accent.

Greymouth is my new home. It's the biggest town on the West Coast, where us Coasters live. It's the commercial and urban hub for the 35,000 folks who live on the coast, with less than 10,000 total. The rest are spread from Karamea to Haast, which is several hours drive in both directions. It's got a branch office of all the major banks, several large grocery stores, equivalents to a K-Mart, Home Depot and small department store, a few cafes, and yet for the life of me I spent a week in search of a lamp that would hold a bulb brighter than a refrigerator bulb and couldn't find one that I was happy with. I wasn't being too picky, really. I found one that held a 60 watt bulb (the largest capacity I could find for a free-standing desk lamp) but it took a style of bulb I'd never seen (pins at the bottom rather than a screw in type) and so didn't buy. Frankly it was pretty dim anyhow. I couldn't read by it, which was the reason for buying it to begin with. Reading from he light of bulb hanging 10 feet above from the ceiling is rather a challenge, without sitting upright in one's bed.

Anyhow, I'm learning to appreciate Greymouth's charms, including it's natural beauty. For example, Greymouth is famous for the 'barber', a cold winter wind that whips down the Grey river valley to the sea, keeping parts of town noticably colder than others, and bringing with it a beautiful fog some mornings. I took this picture on my way to work one morning. The next day the front page of the local paper had a similar photo. I guess I'm not the only one with a bit of civic pride.

More another day...

Bryan