The Freewalkers Guide to the Milford Track: Day Three: I hate this place, Part 7.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007 at 8:34PM We kept rolling downhill with the water. We eventually met up with the main track, crossing a roaring river before descending an uncountable amount of steps. My knees cracked with mutinous fury at slight changes in elevation, further reinforcing my impression that it had been impossibly steep coming down from the pass. After the steps, we paused to admire Sutherland Falls from a distance, as there was no way we would trek the extra bit to their base.
We trudged at a sub-snail’s pace toward Dumpling Hut. It stopped raining at the boardwalk outside of the Hut. We first encountered the bunkrooms upon our arrival at Dumpling. Dumpling had four separate equal sized bunkrooms in two buildings that were separated by a covered walkway. There were also two signs plastered everywhere: those that warned of Kea; and those that asked trekkers not to bring their wet gear into the bunkroom. Quickly, we stripped down to the bare minimum, and dashed inside the nearest bunkroom to avoid the horde of sandflies that appeared the moment we had stopped.
Despite the pack cover, my bag was almost soaked. My boots, rain pants, gaiters, long underwear bottoms and socks were soaked. The only dry item I was wearing was my dry-wick shirt, which was water-free thanks to my gore-tex coat. My coat was definitely more than damp, but had managed to keep my core – and head dry throughout the seven hours I had been in the rain. Fortunately, all of our dry clothes and sleeping bags were also dry in the waterproof sack. Once I had my wife’s sleeping bag out, she immediately climbed in and fell into an exhausted sleep.
I changed into my last set of dirty dry clothes while my muscles ached and complained. Day Three had been the more strenuous than the other two, which felt like years ago. I did not even consider hiking up or down the trail. I gingerly walked over to the communal hut. Just inside the door, I met Ross the Ranger, who was unsurprised by all of the rain. He told me that he was bored by the rain because Dumpling Hut received about nine meters of rain a year. I nodded like I understood, but since I was so bone-tired; I didn’t really grasp the amount he had mentioned.
Two steps later, the numbers hit me like a sore muscle. Nine meters of rain a year was actually twenty-seven feet of rain! That worked out to be 324 inches of rain a year, or almost one inch of rain a day! That meant that what the group had walked through during the day was nothing extraordinary. It was a real ego-breaker to have trekked merely through near normal conditions and ended up completely tired. However, I was glad to have experienced a different kind of normal, even if the challenge left me completely exhausted.
The place where I had collapsed to do math and ruminate on normalcy was a convenient plastic chair by the wood/coal stove which put out a modicum of heat. At first, I was only joined by the only other person I had befriended on the trek, Dirk the German, because my wife was asleep, and no one else had arrived. He had had a rough day of it too as he had taken a bad fall. We sat, ate food, and vainly tried to dry our boots near the stove. Soon, other members of our group arrived, all with wet gear and hairy stories of the day. While there had been no animosity among the group during the previous two days, there also had been no impetus to socialize with unknown people.
But nothing makes people bond like shared tribulations. It had been tough trekking through rivers, creeks, up and down a pass in a downpour for six to eight hours. But, at least now everyone in the group was best friends as we huddled around the stove. Some people had still blue frostbitten fingers. Some people’s sleeping bags were completely soaked through. As quick as the thaw in interpersonal relations, the rack and hooks by the stove were full of wet dripping coats, shirts, soaks, shoes, and sleeping bags. Despite everything all of us had smiles on our faces as we talked of the trek, until fatigue overwhelmed the group to sleep.
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