The Freewalkers Guide to the Milford Track: Day 4: Mile 32 is full of tricks.
Monday, January 29, 2007 at 7:29PM My eyes snapped open. The distant cry of a Kea had woken me. It was just barely light. I listened for any sort of trickling or dripping. I heard nothing. I rolled over, and immediately received a list of angry complaints from my body. Across the way, my wife was looking at my red slug form. I silently motioned that we should get up. While we quietly got dressed, she informed me that I had been snoring loudly.
At breakfast, I learned that my snoring couldn’t have affected that many people. A lot of the group had slept by the stove as their sleeping bags were too wet to use. Breakfast was quiet. My body ached and complained. My core source of energy felt tired and fatigued, despite sleeping nine hours. By looking at the group, I could tell that they felt the exact same way. I knew that I could deal with the fatigue, as I knew that this was the last day of trekking. What I didn’t want to deal with was my boots. I didn’t want to place my feet into their still soaked confines. I dreaded the cold, clammy, corpse-flesh feeling of their interiors. It would have been so much easier to have had frozen boots, snake infested boots, or spider covered boots. As far as I was concerned, the only thing worse than wet boots was having no boots.
Eventually, I let out a long suffering sigh, and placed my feet inside. With our boots on, and our gear packed, we were ready to set out on the trail to catch our boat. The Milford Track runs from the start of Lake Te Anau to Sandfly Point on the Milford Sound. To start the trek, we had taken a boat, and to finish the trek, another separate boat would come to pick us up. This system, however, was evidence to Ross, the Dumpling Hut Ranger, that over time, people had become soft. His basis for this statement was not the hut system, the comforts of sleeping bags and gore-tex, or any of the other modern wonders that trekkers carried. He thought we were soft because we were only doing “half” of the trek.
The night before, he had talked to the group about how the Maori had done the trek centuries before, without shoes and very many clothes in search of jade, or as they called it, “greenstone”. The Maori, he noted sagely, had then returned along a very similar route. He had also told us that after the area had been discovered by the European settlers, and a guide service had been established, parties of 19th century men and women trekked the Milford track in plus-four suits and heavy wool dresses. And, that when these early hikers reached Sandfly Point, a boat did not pick them up; rather, they turned around and trekked back to the start of the trail at Lake Te Anau. He had concluded that we were soft because we only hiked thirty-three and one half miles, instead of the sixty-seven miles or longer that our predecessors had trekked.
As such, Ross’ talk had been the most informative, fascinating and ego-squashing experience of the trip. Despite putting us in our historical place, he had also given the group good advice about when to leave to catch the ferry. It was good advice, because Day Four boasted the longest distance we had to cover on foot. We had to go eighteen more kilometers, around thirteen miles to reach the boat at the end of the trail. With Ross’ schedule in mind, we stomped out of the communal hut, passing a happy Kea tearing up a negligently abandoned mattress outside the bunk hut.
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