2½ Years in the Wilderness
Jim Kimber With hindsight, it was probably not a good sign that I sat down by the side of the track and told Hilary to go on ahead to the hut and leave me to die in the bush. I was leading a trip to Nelson Lakes.
Most of the group was already at the Lake Head Hut, but we were all meant to be somewhere else - Angelus Hut. Things just hadn’t worked out according to plan. We had set off way too late and had foolishly not taken a water taxi. I had underestimated how long it would take the group to walk the Lake Head Track, and with 14 people, we made terribly slow progress. By the time we started up the Cascade Track, we were running short on daylight. Then it started to snow, more and more heavily. Half the group had not used ice axes and crampons before and the long, steep climb up to Angelus in the dark and in heavy snow was not very appealing. So, as daylight faded, we made the call to head back down the Cascade Track and spend the night at Lake Head Hut. About 2 km from the hut I hit the wall. I mean, I completely ran out of energy, abruptly and without warning. I struggled on for what seemed an eternity wishing for the hut to appear, but it just wouldn’t. My legs refused to walk any more and I sat down by the side of the track…
Thankfully Hilary didn’t leave me to die there and eventually I made it to Lake Head Hut. It was packed. At least one party of school kids, and The author enjoying an evening cuppa in Kosciusko NP, Australia (Jim Kimber)
Tramping & Mountaineering 2004 several other groups. It was horrible. But I guess they weren’t exactly rapt either about a party of 14 descending on their already crowded hut.
The next day dawned bright and clear without a cloud in the sky. Robert Ridge looked fantastic with the fresh snow glistening in the sunshine. We all felt very disappointed that we weren’t up there. But we agreed that we had made the right decision the night before and there would be plenty of opportunities to get up there. I decided to return to Nelson Lakes at the earliest opportunity, with a smaller group and make the same trip. What I didn’t know was that it would take me 2½ years.
I became aware I was ill in September 2001. I got an ear infection that made it difficult to stand up straight – I spent the best part of two weeks mostly crawling around my flat because I would bash into things if I tried to walk. I remember watching the events of September 11 lying on the floor. When I got over the ear infection I tried to resume my normal life, but I found I couldn’t. I quickly became dizzy and sick if I exercised, and I got terrible headaches. These got worse as time went by, and the dizziness became a
Tony Lawson trying to remember where he is: it’s the undisputed Kashmir road end (Jim Kimber)
permanent feature. I tried one more tramp – to the Richmond Range in December – but had to spend the middle day in bed nursing a truly horrible headache.
From talking to my doctor and other people and from research, it soon became pretty clear that I had a post-viral fatigue type of illness: ME, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Tapanui Flu as it’s sometimes called in New Zealand. All the stuff I read said that there was not much I could do except rest, and I would get better in time – but the timescale was ridiculous – 3 years… 3 years!! I just could not comprehend being ill for that length of time!
Resting sounds easy, but it really isn’t, particularly if you’re an active person. Before I got ill I was about as fit as I can recall being – I was running, cycling, lifting weights, tramping, playing soccer. I had to give all that up, and more, including walking to and from work and my lunchtime walk, as that was simply more exercise than my body could take right then. I hardly went out, as it made me sick being in noisy places. I discovered I had some very sensitive food intolerances, which meant that I couldn’t really eat anything processed without getting a bad headache. I couldn’t sleep more than about 3 hours a night, despite being tired all the time. I struggled on with work, in order to pay the bills, using up all my accrued annual leave, a heap of sick leave, and then taking Wednesdays off work for a midweek rest (highly recommended, even for healthy people!)
Tramping & Mountaineering 2004
In early 2003 I felt like I was making some progress. The warmer weather and the sunshine helped. I felt I had hit rock bottom sometime in mid-2002 and my body was finally starting to heal. I started walking to work (downhill), and after a while I tried walking home again once or twice a week when I wasn’t too sick. I found some neat routes in the Botanic Gardens, discovered some less well-travelled ridges and gullies.
Sometime in March or April I took my tent out to Otaki Forks, camped out the Saturday night, then walked up past Field Hut to Table Top. It took a supreme effort to get to the top, and I crashed down on the summit like I had climbed Everest. The views of the Kapiti Coast and Kapiti Island were awesome. I was the happiest I had been in a long long time.
I suffered a bit for that climb up to Table Top, but that didn’t put me off planning another trip. The books I had read on ME all said that Graded Exercise Therapy (GET) was a really good way of giving yourself the best chance of making a full recovery. The idea behind GET is that you build up our exercise incrementally, i.e. walk 50m a day for a week, then 60m a day the next week and so on. On a strict reading of GET I probably shouldn’t have gone from a 4-hour day trip straight to a 6-day midwinter tramp, but I reasoned that there was less climbing on the St James Walkway than there was in getting up to Table Top, and I would be in no hurry.
The night before my tramp started the doubts set in. 66 km was a heck of a long way, and my pack was ridiculously heavy (of course I was carrying my usual luxuries – a toaster, a plunger for coffee, countless plastic containers…) Radical times called for radical action: I ordered a steak. 13 years of abstinence from red meat came to an abrupt end. I just had a hunch that it might do me some good, and if nothing else, it might earn me some respect from the cows that frequent the St James Walkway, of which there are many – with horns. (A vegetarian really ought not to be walking this track alone.)
The trip was fantastic. I met 4 people in 6 days, all travelling in he opposite direction. I revelled in the solitude, and soon got into the routine of an early start, 4 or 5 hours tramping, chopping firewood, lighting a fire, reading, cooking dinner, and snuggling up in my sleeping bag by about 7.00. It was too cold in the huts to be up much later than that, even with a fire. Christchurch broke its record low temperatures that week, so goodness knows how cold it was on the St James. The first two days were wet, turning to snow, and then it turned cold, crisp and clear. Thank goodness for down sleeping bags – this was a new experience for me, and made me think myself very tough indeed for using my old synthetic bag for so long, including on the AIC.
I spent two nights at Christopher Hut, which is such a delightful spot that the St James ponies choose to hang out there. I took a day trip up to
Fresh snow at Upper Travers Hut (Jim Kimber)
Did you hear the one about the New Zealander, the Irishman and the Spaniard? (Jim Kimber)
Tramping & Mountaineering 2004 the tops behind Old Christopher Hut, rediscovering bush bashing (The Horror! The Horror!) before following a snowy ridge to an unnamed summit that afforded magnificent views of the surrounding area: Gloriana in her glory, Fairie Queene majestic… and it was so good to be up so high: I had such a sense of achievement!
The walk to Ada Flats, beneath Fairie Queene, was divine. The sun shone, but there were occasional snow flurries and a chill wind. I got a bit spooked at Ada Flats Hut. Don’t know why, maybe the deer skulls attached to the hut… and there was something spooky about the long drop… but I was grateful for the plentiful supply of coal, and although I had to sacrifice the last few chapters of Catch-22 (I had already donated the chapters I had read to another hut) to get the fire going, I had a cosy evening.
The walk out was wet and uneventful and I was glad to reach the car park where the nice man from the Maruia Springs Thermal Resort was waiting for me. A soak in the hot pools and Japanese baths, and another steak & chips were very welcome.
I don’t think that the St James Walkway did much for my health – at least in the short term, as I regressed a bit – but it did wonders for my soul, just being out there again, in the wilderness and the mountains, doing what I love doing.
For the next 6 months I rested a lot, went back to 4 days a week at work, ate lots of steak, lamb chops etc. and made slow but assured progress healthwise. In August I became a Kiwi. Things were definitely looking up.
At Xmas, an English friend of mine, Nell, came to visit and we spent a couple of weeks travelling round the South Island. First stop was Nelson Lakes and a trip up to Angelus Hut via the Cascade Track. This time I allowed 3 days for the trip. The first night we camped in a lovely glade about 100m up the Cascade Track. On day 2 we climbed up to Angelus Hut. It was a lot John and Gareth in the Upper Travers Valley. At this stage we were still thinking of Tramping & Mountaineering 2004
Angelus Hut (Jim Kimber)
steeper and further than I had anticipated, and it made me laugh to think about that previous trip – NO WAY we would have made it up there that night at the pace we were going! But Nell and I made it up there eventually, and I’ll never forget seeing the basin for the first time. What an amazingly beautiful place! The walk out along Robert Ridge was spectacular. It was a cloudless day and we could see for miles. We worked up quite a thirst on the walk back to St Arnaud. The cold beer went down well.
Nell and I got in a little bit more tramping on that trip: a day trip up Avalanche Peak in Arthur’s Pass, and an ill-judged Xmas trip into the Takitimu Mountains (where?!) where the sandflies were extremely ravenous. I seemed to cope pretty well with the
By dawn’s early light: John Doyle crosses the Sabine (Jim Kimber)
exercise, and I was optimistic about making my comeback official by going on a WT&MC trip. In fact, I had already signed up to lead one – in April.
The weeks passed quickly. I got one tramp in, tacked on to a work trip to Canberra, an overnight trip to Kosciusko with a couple I had met in Angelus Hut at Xmas. Kosciusko is a poor excuse for a mountain, but we had a decent enough walk and it was great to camp out at over 2000m.
Around this time I found out that there were still some vacancies on the club committee, including my old social convenor job. They say that fools rush in where angels fear to tread, but with many of the old faces returning for another stint on the committee, I couldn’t help but feel like Jake in the Blues Brothers, all excited about ‘getting the band back together’. Taking on the social convenor job again held a lot of significance for me – it was like I had got my old life back again. And besides, I heard that the standards of tea under Glynne’s stewardship had deteriorated to the point of desperation.
Suddenly late April rolled around and I was organising my comeback trip, a medium trip to Makaretu Hut in the Ruahines, from the Kashmir Road End, from where I had started my second ever trip with the club. I must admit I was a total stress ball the week of the trip, worrying about not just me, Tramping & Mountaineering 2004 but everyone else – would people collect the gear, turn up to the station, bring all the right stuff, get on with each other, like my menu… what if it rained, what if the rivers were too high… how the heck did you put up a fly…? As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. My punters were the loveliest bunch of people you could wish to tramp with, and I made some good friends on that trip, John Doyle, Brodders, Emily and John Marney in particular. The tramping was great, the weather was fine, the food went down a treat (particularly with John Marney, who ate the toasted pita breads faster than I could toast them…). As for the fly, well, I’m still not really sure how they go up, but as long as I keep leading trips. I can keep delegating that task…
So I’ll close here. There’s no need to tell you about my subsequent trips to Nelson Lakes, Taranaki, the Ruahines again. The point is, I’ve made it back after a long 2½ years in the wilderness, and it’s so good! The moral of the story, if you haven’t worked it out, is that if you find yourself sitting by the side of track telling your companions to leave you to die in the bushes, well, unless it’s the Tararuas, in which case that would be perfectly understandable, maybe something is not quite right. There’s a famous quote from some doctor that 90% of the population is in need of more rest than more exercise, and maybe he’s got a point. More steak too, I’d add.
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