The Freewalkers Guide to the Milford Track - Day Two: Beware the Kea, Part 4
Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 3:02PM Mintaro Hut was clean, charming, and cozy. Where Clinton Hut had felt like an open air sun kissed compound, Mintaro was secluded, cloistered, and was trapped in its clearing by the surrounding forest. Mintaro itself was a single building with a large covered porch, dark communal kitchen area, and three bunkrooms. The two bunkrooms on the bottom were long, narrow corridors with the standard bunk-beds from Clinton. Both lower bunkrooms appeared to be a little cramped to me, so I decided to check out the upstairs bunkroom. The ceiling of the room was the Hut’s angled roof, and the room was decidedly much darker than below.
While it had less light than below, it also had a lot more space than the downstairs areas, with little individualized bunk-bed cubicles. It was obvious where to stay. I brought the gear upstairs, unpacked our stuff on two adjacent upper bunks with a view of a window, and then returned to my wife downstairs. Eleven miles had been the farthest she’d ever had to backpack. For a majority of the miles, she walked with extreme discomfort. And yet, she had avoided getting soaked and had outpaced a majority of the group. Her last six hours of utter toughness, had drained every last vestige of energy from her. She was tired out and ready to rest. So without any guilt at all, she decided to take a nap.
I, however, after a half hour sitting down without a backpack dragging me closer to the soil, was feeling good. I went downstairs. I studied the chart about MacKinnon Pass, which we would summit during the next day. Then, I ran into the Mintaro DOC Ranger. He suggested that I head for the summit of the pass immediately. His actual words were that I “should have left five minutes ago”. But, as I could not turn back time I departed straightaway. The Ranger wasn’t suggesting that I summit MacKinnon, and keep going; merely that I head up to the summit to take in the view, because it was surely going to rain later that evening, and all of tomorrow, and as such, I wouldn’t want to linger then.
I headed back to the main trail, and proceeded to the Mintaro Lake junction. As I was merely sightseeing, I decided to check it out. The Lake was vacant, except for two ducks who hooted indignantly at me. I stood at the shoreline, and peered up at the cloud-covered mountains. I doubted that I had enough time or energy to make the summit after going the distance I already had; but as I decided to go as far as I could.
Once I was back on the trail, the absolute quietness of the forest made me pause. If the forest around Clinton was primordial, the forest around Mintaro was distinctly different. It was green, and lush, but the comparison stopped there. The green was earthy around Mintaro, with creeping moss covering swaths of trees and land, dangling and pulsing with life. The green around Clinton had been quite lively, but more of the productive “lets photosynthesize” organized green. With moss dangling from all trees, and creeping on the rocks around the path, the trail around Mintaro appeared less like an ordinary pass-summiting route, and more a gateway to a fairy land. As I stood still to photograph the area, it almost seemed that my surroundings would absorb me, covering me with moss, transforming me into a weathered tree of the forest.
The boney branches shivered their mossy skin, and odd groaning voices whispered around my ears in gasping gusts as the intermittent cold breeze from the pass ran down the valley. The hairs on my neck rose in unison. I gingerly moved one foot from its silent rooted location, then the other. The spell was broken. Two steps away from my self-imposed surreal experience, a man-made suspension bridge crossed an empty creek.
Reader Comments (5)
"The boney branches shivered their mossy skin, and odd groaning voices whispered around my ears in gasping gusts as the intermittent cold breeze from the pass ran down the valley."