Day 62 – St. Arnaud to Red Hills Hut

Good news this morning! Mari from the rural post says they have my package, and I’ll be able to pick it up at the fire station between 2:30 and 3:00 today.  I didn’t much mind the waiting, since yesterday’s rain was not due to end until this afternoon.

Opening my package was joy.  Even though I knew everything I would find in it, it still felt like getting a present.  Inside there were all sorts of good food, full fresh bags of dried fruits and nuts and chocolate pretzels.  There were non-food powerups too: a fresh pair of candles for reading in the huts at night, a new roll of toilet paper and a new set of maps.  I’ve said in the past that shopping as one proceeds along a through-hike is the way to go, since you get more variety and less hassle.  But using mail drops has distinct advantages as well.  Besides the joy of opening the package, I also saved the time I would have spent shopping, which is a surprisingly time-consuming activity given that I nearly always buy the same items.  Time spent salivating in front of food displays is probably the main cause of delay.

I was on the road and in the rain by 3:30.  I hoped to get as far as the first hut but was resigned to camping if I couldn’t.  I just wanted to get moving.  There weren’t many cars on the road and few of them were stopping for me, so I walked while I hitched.  It’s only about twelve kilometers from St. Arnaud to the Red Hills trailhead, so I might have walked the whole way before I got a ride.

Two kilometers later, I finally got a ride.  The woman said “I’m only going a short distance.”  I replied: “That’s fine, I only need to go about ten kilometers.”  She was going only eight and a half, but I got in anyhow.  I described the trailhead to her as best I could, but I hadn’t been able to find any good descriptions of it online and planned to rely on my GPS.  Turns out I was doubly lucky to get this ride, because the woman driving knew all about this trailhead, including the fact that it had been moved in December so my GPS maps would be out of date.  She also had a good idea of how long it would take to get to Red Hills Hut.  She told me I would definitely not reach it before dark, but after the first couple of kilometers the track would turn into a four-wheel-drive track, which would be easy to follow even after nightfall.

I zipped quickly along the newly cut and marked DoC track.  It’s an interesting bit of trail that mounts a small moraine and follows it lengthwise for a kilometer or two.  There were intermittent views through the trees.  I could see that the mountains to the south had a lovely fresh coat of white above 1,500 meters or so, where yesterday’s rain fell as snow.  Nice to look at, but worrisome.  The clerk at the Alpine Lodge had assured me that the Red Hills, through some meteorological quirk, don’t always get snow when the Nelson Lakes park does.  Still, I was concerned that tomorrow I might need to cross rough terrain in the snow.

Today though I was focussed on trying to get to the hut before dark.  I reached the four-wheel-drive road and started trucking uphill at top speed.  I made good progress, but the hill was steep and the road didn’t seem to end.  Finally when I couldn’t see the road without a torch, I took my first break of the evening.  As I sat  there, I noticed a light on some of the nearby trees.  Headlights, I wondered?  Maybe somebody was parked nearby?  It was the full moon rising!  So when I got up I found that I began to have more and more light.

I had heard this hut was rather dismal, but when I arrived it was not nearly as bad as I expected. The bunks were solid and the floor was tidy. When I lit a candle to cook dinner I saw the source of most objections; the place was covered floor-to-ceiling in graffiti. I don’t generally object to graffiti as much as some do. Given a well-written bathroom stall I will often linger to finish reading the thoughts of the former inhabitants. This hut was especially amusing because, as if by unwritten agreement, most of the graffitists had chosen to write in rhyme. There were no limericks here. That form would be much too constraining for the authors of such straightforward verse as “seagull, seagull, in the sky / Why’d you do that in my eye? / Boy I’m glad that cows don’t fly.”

One passerby had even undertaken to cover the entirety of the wall above the cook station with a long-form poem about wilderness, starting with the morepork’s cry. The poor author was subjected to the rough dealing of his fellow lyricists, one of whom noted at a later date “blantly mundane in rythme and rhyme [sic].”

The award for most charming graffito, however, goes to a ten-year-old who, determined to contrast with many of the cruder items, transcribed and illustrated a short educational article about the habits of a native butterfly that lives among the tussocks. It was a nice effort, but his noble pen was like a mere finger in the dike against the flood of authors so determined to be profane that they remembered to haul felt-tip markers up the mountain with them.