Outdoors: A last dram round the campfire

By COLIN MOORE

One of the more frequent questions I am asked is which outdoor activity I prefer. Tramping or sea kayaking? Skiing or sailing? Climbing or diving? Well, none of those, I usually reply. They're just a means to an end. The activity I enjoy most is sitting around a fire, or in the hut, at the end of the day cradling a whisky.

My answer may be a tad mischievous but it is mostly true. I am not one who sees there is much gain in pain.

There may be times when I am happy to subscribe to Aristotle's opinion that means are more important than ends, particularly if I don't reach the summit or finish in the medals, so to speak.

But struggling up hill and down dale all day with a heavy pack and the rain bucketing down, or battling against tide and wind in a sea kayak for several hours, is not something I set out to do for the fun of it, nor even for the satisfaction of a hard job achieved - although I admit that battling and succeeding against the elements, or any challenge, can be satisfying.

No, what I enjoy most is the environment. And the only way to appreciate fully the wonder of the bush, to reflect on its creation, to let it assail your every sense, is to make the effort to walk through it in splendid isolation.

To sit on a deserted, hidden beach to which you have paddled by kayak and watch the sea and headlands, smell the air and set your imagination free is a spiritual experience that you won't find in the luxury of a cruise ship.

So reflecting on a day that has been in the outdoors, with a whisky and good companions, is indeed the activity I enjoy most.

It was in honour of the New Zealand environment that this column began on February 28, 1987. It was the centenary year of the New Zealand National Parks and, as I persuaded the then features editor at the Herald, an appropriate time to acknowledge the popularity of non-competitive outdoor pursuits.

I was a new father, and discovering anew this country's greatest resource, its environment. You cannot carry children on your back into a nightclub; you can take them outdoors. The children have grown up and this column has passed its use-by date. So the column is to disappear from the Herald after today.

But the New Zealand outdoors and the thousands of people who, like myself, worship in its cathedrals will not disappear.

It may be the environment that has moved me over the years, but it is the many wonderful friends I have met there that has sustained me. They have encouraged my writing with kind words and letters that for a journalist are worth more than any awards certificate.

The Outdoors column began as a reporting job and evolved as I realised that readers enjoyed the stories of my own modest adventures.

One of the compliments I am most proud of came from knee surgeon Barry Tietjens, who was checking out my wonky knee. He said he enjoyed my columns because they were non-threatening. His wife would sometimes put a clipping under the fridge magnet to encourage the family to do something similar in the outdoors.

When people ask me about my favourite place in the world, there is only one possible answer - this country, and specifically, my bach in the Far North.

A final column in the Herald is a time to reflect, and my mind has been racing over the many adventures I have written about. A collection of them, Outdoors in New Zealand, is to be published by New Holland in September. One story not in the book but which, for some reason, comes to me as I write this, relates to my first attempt to climb Mt Cook with noted mountain guide, the late Gary Ball.

It was, perhaps, an adventure of the ego to compensate, at 40, for a career that had plateaued forever. So I ran the Rotorua marathon, completed a short-course triathlon, and faced Mt Cook, where none of my editorial superiors at the Herald had been before or since. Yet what I wrote would have made Aristotle happy.

"To languish in brilliant sunshine outside Plateau Hut on the Grand Plateau of Mt Cook is all the reason required to be there.

"The east face of New Zealand's highest peak, rising 3762m into the clear sky, framed by the blackness of the Zubriggen and Bowie Ridges, monopolises the visual senses. The lesser mortals of the Main Divide, Teichelmann, Graham, Silberhorn and Tasman exhaust peripheral vision.

"Below, the glistening vastness of the Grand Plateau funnels its cargo of mountain-shed ice down the Hochstetter Icefall, jumbled like an overturned bucket of play blocks.

"From the hut perched precariously above, the cavernous fissures and hall-sized blocks appear harmlessly small.

"You cannot hear silence; you can hear a wind-tattered plastic bag that an errant climber has left half buried in the snow sound in the gentlest of breezes like a loose tarpaulin on a high-speed roof-rack.

"From far out of sight comes the regular and momentarily disconcerting thump of ice avalanches, probably crashing off Mt Vancouver into the Linda Glacier, the most common route for an assault on that premier of peaks. A New Zealand pipit, the snow thrush, darts back and forth, through the narrow, rucksack-trapping gap between the hut door and the high point of the rocky island the shelter sits on.

"The bird disdains the crumbs of bread that it slithers on the snow to investigate. It seeks the tiny insects borne upwards from the glacial moraine a thousand metres below and sucked through the gap.

"Beneath the hut light aircraft flying tourists past the icefall appear as insects too, against the backdrop of the metalled expanse and melt pools of the lower Tasman Glacier.

"The sun is lazily penetrative. A clipping from the Christian Science Monitor, given by a friend some time ago and now unfolded for its first reading, explores the luxury of rest, best known to infants and animals.

"Prompted by the writer's sleeping son, the column challenges some accepted priorities of the modern world. The peaceful infant represents a luxury no money can ever buy. It is appropriate stuff in this environment."

We never did get to the summit; avalanche danger forced a retreat. But re-reading the above, I don't think that bagging a summit mattered. I experienced what I set out to find.

See you in the hills. Or around the fire.

* colinmoore@xtra.co.nz