From this year a hut on the Milford Track will set back New Zealand residents $92 a night.
In the summer of 1992, Kiwis could take on the “World’s Finest Walk” for a maintenance fee of just $3.
In retrospect it seems like an unbelievably good deal, even if you had to share huts with three dozen walkers and 2000 sandflies. But are New Zealand’s Great Walks still good value?
Although the landscape might be familiar to any of the tourists first taken by Quentin McKinnon over the Omanui pass, there’s been a seismic shift in attitudes to what became the Great Walks.
With just over 7000 trampers spending almost $300 for three nights and 53.5km of type 2 fun - in just 30 years the walk has changed beyond all recognition.
Fees for walkers on the country’s top tramping routes are to increase by almost a fifth (18 per cent) from April - the most significant fee increase in the Great Walks network’s three-decade history.
The Department of Conservation, which runs the network of 10 multi-day tramps and serviced huts, says the price hike is down to rising maintenance costs and inflation means. The network is struggling to keep pace with costs.
Pre-pandemic, the network brought in revenue of $12.5 million for DoC, though its income has yet to return to this level, with two of the trails out of action due to storms last year.
With little appetite to increase the number of huts on fragile conservation land - and in the case of Waikaremoana and Heaphy fewer bunks being available over the season - the department says prices have no direction to go but up.
Despite the network’s beginnings as a way to conserve the trails as an affordable pastime for future generations, each year there are more would-be walkers competing for the same number of increasingly expensive slots.
Hiking up the Clinton Valley on the Milford Track. Photo / Thomas Bywater
It’s definitely no longer the cheap, carefree budget option you might remember from summers past.
The cost of walking Milford, the most sought-after Great Walk, has more than doubled in the past decade.
The Ultimate Hikes - the only private operator with a concession to run huts on the Fiordland Great Walks - still prices itself well above the publicly owned DoC facilities.
At $1820 for a shared adult bunk on the Routeburn, it’s a fee most backpackers would baulk at. Although, after paying $240 in hut fees and the same again for a car relay, rental and airfares, there’s not as much difference as you might think.
Even with a return to around 60 per cent of international tramper numbers pre-pandemic, DoC says it still has to push up prices for all walkers.
In 2019 DoC introduced an international pricing split, with overseas guests paying a premium of about 50 per cent.
From April, children aged 5 to 17 - who previously could book huts for free - will also have to pay half an adult fare, as part of the 2024 pricing review.
Although the network may have celebrated its 30th anniversary, adding four more tracks across the country to the original seven Great Walks, the growth of interest in the trails is still outpacing the spaces in the bunk huts.
The introduction of new trails such as the Paparoa on the West Coast in 2019 or Tuatapere’s the Hump Ridge Track, which comes online this year, has been seen as a way to ease pressure on the network.
It’s one of the country’s great tourism success stories. In the past decade, the number of walkers has grown by 37 per cent to about 110,000 a season.
But have the tracks become victims of their own success? There is perhaps no better virtual illustration of the pressure on the network than the annual fritz of online booking systems.
The 1965 Freedom Walk group at Sandfly Point. Photo / Otago Tramping Club via Department of Conservation
Last year demand for the Great Walks literally broke the internet. Or the DoC website at least, delaying the release of bunks for three months.
Next year brings the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Walk. A “hīkoi” organised by Otago Tramping Club, the hippies walked the Milford route to protest against paying fees to the Tourism Hotel Corporation - the government tourism body that controlled access to the route at the time.
The “right on” right-to-roam types asserted that because the trail was on public conservation land, there should be no restriction on access. They spent the week camping in the Clinton Valley in open protest.
A noble sentiment but one that is never going to cover the cost of a $3m Mintaro Hut restoration.
It’s something the Department of Conservation might recognise in its seemingly contradictory goals - to both preserve natural taonga for future generations and accommodate the growing public appetite for the outdoors.
It’s a tightrope that conservation bodies the world over are having to walk.
