Huts in the Orongorongo Valley: Sixth Tramping Trip

   In the last two weeks of April I was away on another 'hut hop' drawing more huts for The Art of a Hut collection. This time the destination was the Orongorono Valley in the Rimutaka Range just east of Wellington. It was a very different trip compared to the usual weary tramps up and down steep and disappearing tracks in the highest ranges of the North Island. In this valley there are so many huts so close together that the longest I had to walk to a hut was two hours and we managed to stay in one hut for the whole 11 days we were there.

 Here are the three of us, Guillaume, Me, and Jerualem. The same three from the 

Whanganui Hut Hop. We found a hut, Rata, which had a big shiny window so we took a selfie of ourselves, after many tries we managed to get this.

   Before going down I had contacted the Orongorongo Club about a place to stay. They were very helpful and managed to find us a hut to stay in. In the whole valley there are about 60 private huts. They are very different to DOC huts, since they are all privately owned and as it is possible to drive a 4X4 up the valley on the riverbed a lot of these huts are very well set up. They are almost more like little batches than huts, but they all had simple beginnings. The hut we stayed at was one of the oldest in the valley. 

   Many beautiful places to look out from on some of the tracks that lead up to hidden huts. On the day we arrived the weather was perfect and the whole place looked like paradise.

  Near Paua Hut we had some fun on the long swing from a high up branch. This stand of native beech trees was so beautiful and magical especially with the sun streaming and dappling through the branches.

This is Nikau Hut and the painting I did of it on the first day. There was one tree right in the way of my favorite view of it, so I simply didn't paint it in. It was quite amazing how a few hours into the painting I forgot all about that tree and simply didn't even see it any more. It reminded me about selective sight, how we only see what we are conscious of and how easily many things go overlooked though they are right in front of us. It is good to be aware of this as an artist for it makes me look at what I'm painting more intensely, and not get into the habit of painting what I think I see instead of properly looking and seeing how it truly is. In order to interpret shapes and edges into recognizable objects the brain edits stuff out and learns to jump to conclusions about things. As an artist I have to stop seeing a hut as a hut but as a collection of shapes and edges working together to form the image. In this way I can make in image of what is really there as opposed to what I think is there. Often two different things!

   This hut had no dunny, but it had a toilet!! That was one of the best things about it, it had a flush toilet with an amazing view. Jerusalem was quite taken with it and spent a good deal of time sitting on it writing in his journal!

  Guillaume enjoyed the unheard of contraption called a 'yellow wheelbarrow' and found it entertaining to fill it with wood and wheel it the short distance from woodshed to hut.

  When we were shopping for food for the trip Jerusalem insisted that we wouldn't buy any meat as he would catch all the meat we needed. So we brought only two cans of tuna and yes he caught us meat. On the first night at the hut the boys caught an eel from the river and a couple of days after Jerusalem came back from hunting with a wild pig. It was a nice size and lasted us the whole time in there. 

  I spent every day searching for huts and drawing them. There were two days when it poured with rain but I managed to work inside and painted a small oil painting of the rifle and a couple of lanterns above the open fire.

Journey's End

  It was a novel experience walking to all the huts and ticking them off on our map as we found them. Usually we walk five hours between huts, here we only had to walk five minutes in the bush until someone would sing out 'I've found another one here!'  They were quite well hidden and we meet a number of people who come regularly to the valley and had no idea where all the huts were. Fortunately we had a map with all the huts marked on it which proved very helpful and by the end of the trip was in three pieces.

   It was fun meeting people in some of the huts. During the week we saw no one but come the weekend there were people everywhere!

Tahara Hut

  There were a few very cute and unique dunnys. And some very unusual huts:

Waikapai Hut

Drawing Kiwi Hut

   A couple of the huts had some sort of paintings on the walls, this one, Riverside Hut, had beautiful murals painted on the outside walls. It made something special and different out of an otherwise plain hut.

Xanadu Hut dunny

   All the huts are locked of course except Bane Iti and Hebron. Hebron Hut we spent a long time looking for scrambling through ferns and supple jack until we finally found the remains of an A-frame hut slowly falling apart with age.

   While I worked the guys drank tea...and slept... Well, not all of the time I guess. Guillaume did a lot of wood cutting climbed a mountain or two and did some school work he'd brought. Jerusalem went hunting all the time until he shot the pig, then he spent the last week cooking it.

   This is the bridge at the beginning of the track out of the valley which is only a 1.5 hour walk.

    I really enjoyed it and felt my first earthquake! I was sitting on a big log one morning in front of a hut painting when suddenly the whole thing began to wobble and shake. That evening I heard on the radio (yes we had a radio in our hut!!) that there had been an earthquake in the area. Overall it was a very relaxing trip.Or should have been. At first I felt like I had a lot of time to do all the drawing I wanted to get done but as the days passed I realized I could spend months painting in that valley and still have more I'd want to do. I wanted to do some landscapes as well as huts, but only had time for a small watercolour of the river.

  But I still managed to get lots more drawing done than I usually would on a trip that long since there was less time walking and more for drawing. I have gathered enough material to do some nice larger paintings and a large drawing which I have already visualized in my head. In my next post I will share some of my paintings and sketches from the trip.

Goats and 1080 Poison.

   While we were hut hopping through the Whanganui National Park we saw so many wild goats. They thrive in the bush down there and DOC has a hard time trying to keep the numbers down. I hear of people who are employed to go out several months at a time into the bush to cull them. 

   Jerusalem shot two goats during the first two days of tramping. The first a young one which we ate and enjoyed very much in a curry. The second goat was a black nanny goat the boys shot at Trains Hut. While I was busy painting they went of to get us some meat. I heard several shots and they eventually came back with the kill. 

   To make a long story short, they had stalked the goat, shot it, wounded it, they shot again, and it fell over and promptly disappeared. When they went over to investigate they saw it had fallen about 4m down into a ravine. They had a bit of a scramble around and down to retrieve the quarry.

   They spent the rest of the day processing the meat. They cut it in strips and dried/smoked it in the chimney and around the stove. Jerusalem cooked up a whole lot in a stew for dinner which we all enjoyed very much. It was to be our last fresh meat for the rest of the eight days.

    Next morning we packed up and began walking down the track, a few meters from the track we turn and actually read the signs that we had seen but not paid any attention to. It looked just like this one I took a photo of at another hut:

   So basically we had just eaten a goat which was poisoned.  We had no idea how much a poisoned goat would affect us, but it was very likely it had eaten poison because as we walked on up the track we began to see a lot of 1080 bait all over the ground dropped by air. We thought it was better to be safe than sorry and threw out all the dried meat we had. Trains Hut was on the boarder of the poisoned area so the first young goat we ate would not have been poisoned having been shot well out of the poisoned area. 

    Jerusalem texted an uncle who told us that we would have to eat quite a lot of poisoned goat meat to kill us and we hadn't eaten enough to even get sick. We were glad to hear that, but the text caused a lot of rumors to get spread about among our friends and when we got home everyone thought we had been sick and dying! 

   I know that possums and other pests need to be controlled, but I don't like 1080 at all. It is deadly and kills everything, I don't know enough about it to comment, but seeing the deadly 1080 bait all throughout the forest floor and then seeing animals lying dead along the path just makes me feel sick. Surely there must be a better way of pest control without having to endanger all the animal life in the bush.

    P.S. I have since done research. 1080 kills the massive amounts of pests that we don't want in our bush that's good it helps bird population, dramatically in some cases. But I still don't like the idea of poison in our native forests causing thousands of animals to die in agony native 'protected' wildlife and farm animals included. My personal opinion is that people spend more energy finding a good pest control alternative to 1080 than arguing. Please don't get too fired up in the comments this is supposed to be a nice happy art blog...!

If you are interested in the issue visit these opposing sites.
DOC  vs. The 1080haters

 If you are interested in beautiful art click here...

Poutaki Hut and our Video

   This is my painting of Poutaki Hut. It was the second of six huts we stayed at on my recent Ruahine Hut Hop. The hut was built in 1983 as a recreational hut and to replace the Puketoi Musterers hut which was later burned down by 'armature poachers'. This hut is is a doomed one. Not many people go there these days and DOC has decided to only provide 'minimal maintenance' and if it falls into disrepair it will be removed. However, it was in good condition when we visited, and looks well loved by a few regulars. I can imagine it will be around for a long while yet. It was one of our favorite huts, and had a great little stove which got red hot and kept us warm. Hawkes Bay Hiking and Tramping has a blog post about this hut and the walk there which has good views of the Ruahine Range and Hawkes Bay.

   I decided to do a painting of this hut. It's the first painting I have done of a hut on location. I painted on primed A4 watercolour paper. It was a good size to take as the few sheets I brought could fit in my sketchbook to stay flat, my drawing paper was much bigger and I kept it rolled in a tube. The only trouble was getting it dry to pack away after I had finished. I used water mixable oils and did not use any medium, so they were similar to acrylic and dried quickly, and I finished drying it behind the stove so it was no trouble at all. 

   I started painting when the sun was low behind the clouds directly in front of me, but as several hours went by the lighting changed dramatically. Sometimes I began to feel like I was trying to change my painting along with the lighting, then I realized I could go on all day like that and never catch up with those changing shadows. I learnt a lot doing this sketch, but the hut is the only part of it I'm happy with, the rest is a bit of a mess, all my messing around trying to chase the light! I should like to do more paintings of huts in the future. The original plan for The Art of a Hut project was to concentrate on drawings, and I still wish to do that, but as I have said before, I would like to add a bit of colour into it.

Last week I finished a little movie of our Ruahine hut drawing trip from the videos that Nathaniel took.