Links
- The Tararua Aorangi Remutaka Huts Committee supports the back-country hut networks and promotes recreational use in the in the Tararua, Aorangi and Remutaka Forest Parks.
- The Ruahine User Group is a volunteer network dedicated to promoting and maintaining back-country huts and tracks in the central North Island
- The Department of Conservation (DOC) website
- The Backcountry Trust website (updates on projects and funding application forms). You can keep astride of the Trust's work and some of the public feedback around it on the Huts And Tracks Facebook Page.
- Each of the hut pages on the site has a small embedded map. If you click on this you'll go directly to the area that it's located on the NZ Topomap website.
- If you have Google Earth on you can download an overlay of all the DOC tracks and hut sites from Mediafire.
- Other Facebook pages of interest are the Ex NZFS Page, which focuses on historical aspects, and the the group's current hut maintenance activities.
- Hairsplitters and hut baggers and oglers will probably enjoy Hugh van Noorden's Best Hut Ever page.
- Frank King of Christchurch has a Tramping Blog that includes some of the huts on this website.
- A more comprehensive website that covers most of the Huts and tracks around the country, including many on the remote Huts site is the New Zealand Tramper Website.
- There is a website for the Arthur's Pass National Park area which has webcams, a gallery of photos of the huts in the Park, weather, climbing, hut, bridge and track information, and Search And Rescue (SAR) reports.
- Geoff Aitken has a website that publishes topomaps to assist people to get out in the hills. New Topo NZ has a new map of the Westland side of the Arthurs Pass area that folk may find useful.
- The Palmerston North Tramping and Mountaineering Club's Website covers Huts in the Ruahines, Tararuas, and more.
- The Victoria University Tramping Club Website.
- For those wanting to stay in touch while in the mountains, the Canterbury Mountain Radio Service hires out radios at reasonable rates.
- Kea Database have an online sighting platform that allows people to record sightings, report and follow individual banded kea or record non-sightings in areas they would normally expect to see birds.
Relevant Publications
- Shelter From the Storm: (Craig Potton Publishing): Shaun Barnet, Rob Brown and Geoff Spearpoint: A doorstopper of a book chock full of photos and a detailed history of high-country huts in New Zealand. Many of the huts on the website are mentioned with plenty of detail on their history and construction. In 2016 the boys released a sequel called, A Bunk for the Night: A Guide To New Zealand’s Best Backcountry Huts: which is published by Potton and Burton.
- South Island Weekend Tramps: Nick Groves: A bit dated now but a few of the huts on this site are included in this collection
- Tramping in New Zealand: 40 Great Tramping Trips: By Shaun Barnett and the larger and more recent Tramping co-authored with Chris Maclean. The latter is a comprehensive history of tramping in New Zealand and traces its origins from Maori and early European times to the present. This is also a Potton and Burton publication.
- The Canterbury Westland Alps: A Climbing And Transalpine Guide: Yvonne Cook And Geoff Spearpoint: This one covers the Central Southern Alps and is for the more serious alpinists.
- The Great Unknown: By Geoff Spearpoint is a compendium of some of the epic transalpine trips he's done between the early 1970's and 2019. The usual eye watering photography along with his accounts. Published by Potton and Burton.
- Bushcraft: A Publication by the new Zealand Mountain Safety Council. Essential preparatory reading for aspiring remote hutters.
- Classic Tramps (Revised Edition): Shaun Barnett: The Frews - Toaroha circuit has been added to this edition.
- Gone Bush: Paul Kilgour. A well written autobiographical account from a veteran hutbagger and Permolat member (Harper/ Collins)
Health and safety
- All "official" volunteer projects being carried out on public conservation land require the submission of a DOC-formulated, several page long, Health and Safety Plan. The legality of this requirement is dubious as we are not DOC employees, and mostly not working on DOC projects. Moreover, the volunteer sector has a wealth of experience in fields such as building, forestry, and the outdoors, in which effective risk management is a prerequisite. Unfortunately you won't get any funding through BCT if you don't play the compliance game, even though there's no good evidence it makes any difference to safety outcomes. What it does do is suck up time and resources, and stifle worker creativity, spontaneity, and self-responsibility. The risk matrices are predicated on something called "base rate neglect" in which risk is calculated in terms of the most serious outcome (eg, drowning crossing a river), rather than the actual probability of it occurring (we wouldn't run a project if there was extreme weather forecast). It is essentially a disempowerment model and is equally onerous for DOC field staff who also have to use them.
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DOC-Permolat Schedule of Work
- Permolat now has formal general agreement with DOC that covers the huts and tracks in Westland, that are unmaintained or only minimally maintained. Anyone thinking of carrying out a project on one of these can contact us. They will also need to identify and liaise with the key DOC person in the area concerned.
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