Some walkers reach a hut burdened with a heavy pack and an outsized sense of entitlement. You might be surprised at how often wardens are asked about the availability of a helicopter so a repetition of the walk in could be avoided. One small group abandoned a full pack on the track halfway in from the road, only to demand that DOC fly it out for them after another baffled tramper picked it up and carried it all the way to the hut.

A peculiarity of Te Araroa walkers can be an obsession with speed and minimalism. I have encountered some who forego hot meals and a cuppa for five months in order to save the few grams that fuel and a cooker might add to their pack weight. Others actually plan to run out of food a full 24 hours before re-supply is available, just to save some weight.

Of course, this all works well until it doesn’t. One European walker had experienced three unplanned foodless days on the wrong side of a flooded stream in the Tararua. From then on, he carried a full week’s worth of spare food in a pack so heavy the shoulder strap broke repeatedly.

Another TA subset is the Dry Feet Brigade, who obsessively replace their footwear with Crocs before each river crossing, re-suiting with socks and footwear on the other side.

There are also some wonderful light-and-fast teams who know their stuff, are tuned into the weather and plan to maximise every opportunity. One pair zipped up the Copland Valley to summit Mt Sefton, then flew back to Welcome Flat in lightweight paragliders for a quick soak in the hot pools before heading back to the road, all in the same day. Another trio carried skis to the snowline, skinned up the glacier, summitted successfully then skied back down.

Another tale, firmly in the ‘intrepid’ category, is that of a young woman who ‘hurt’ her leg when a boulder rolled on her as she crossed a new slip. She limped out to the road and caught a ride to the hospital in the nearest city, only to emerge with plaster to the thigh on her broken leg.

There’s certainly some interesting people. One time, at Blue Lake Hut, my three residents were a dairy farmer who was also a monk looking for a quiet place to meditate, a religious studies professor just passing through, and a veteran of multiple ayahuasca (a South American psychoactive) brew ‘trips’ in Peru. Our conversation traversed some fascinating territory.

Hut warden duties are not onerous. To qualify, you need a police check and Children’s Act clearance, plus a current first aid certificate. Backcountry experience is helpful. Basic duties include keeping the hut clean and tidy, meeting radio schedules, updating weather forecasts, and being a friendly face to greet walkers at the end of their tramp. Some basic track maintenance may be necessary.

My favourite task at Welcome Flat Hut is ‘Check hot pools each day to ensure water temperature is appropriate for soakers.’

A typical day there starts before dawn.  I stroll up the track, a steaming mug of coffee in my hand, to lie back in one of the four pools and watch the peaks across the river turn pink, one by one, as the sun rises, all to the cheerful cacophony of local frogs. After a glorious half-hour, the frogs hand over to the dayshift of korimako and tūī, and all these creatures let rip together. It sounds much like Leonard Cohen’s midnight choir of drunks. Even a solitary morepork can join in, from a distance.

The Copland Track is frequently closed due to bad weather and, for a hut warden, the chance of having a few days entirely alone is quite appealing. Books can be read, podcasts enjoyed, scones made in the camp oven. The more spectacular storms are themselves A-grade entertainment as thunder rolls around the valley walls and the flooded river’s noise drowns out all other sounds.

DOC hut books are a source of idle curiosity on storm-battered days. The older ones have a column headed ‘Main activity this trip’, in which 99 per cent of respondents dutifully write ‘tramping’. I try to imagine what early explorers through the Copland might have written, had they encountered a hut book, and decide that female visitors would almost certainly have written the word ‘scandalising’.

Nelson’s Constance Barnicoat crossed the Copland Pass in April 1902 and passed through Welcome Flat on her way to the coast. She shocked people by refusing to wear skirts, choosing instead to ‘dress like a man’ in trousers. Later, Freda du Faur (the first woman to summit Aoraki Mt Cook) got tongues wagging by daring to be unmarried while accompanied by male guides.

I met another boundary pusher one afternoon when there was an urgent rap on the door of my hut. A slight Korean woman delivered the calamitous news that the track upstream had been obliterated by a slip. She was travelling alone, and I invited her in to show me where the damage had occurred. She flicked out her phone and pointed to the spot on her digital map.

“Ah,” I said, biting my lip. “We have already been upstream of that point this morning. The track up there actually looks like that a lot of the time.”

The news was greeted with a hearty laugh and the conversation that followed was full of lengthy pauses. She blinked behind the round discs of her John Lennon glasses, silently composing sentences in Korean, mentally translating them, checking the syntax and re-conjugating some verbs before speaking in flawless English. I heard all about her emergence from a long tramp in Otago to a world transformed by a lockdown she knew nothing about. She also told me of her helicopter rescue from Taranaki Maunga in January. “It was their 28th for the year,” she said, before finishing her tea and trotting off to her next adventure.

DOC has increasingly turned to volunteers to watch over the more popular huts. Initially, unpaid wardens filled in for their fully employed colleagues during time off, but I suspect some bean counter noticed this and thought ‘Aha!’ Now volunteers seem to be the only ones on deck in many regions. Given the new government’s identification of DOC as being in line for an ‘efficiency dividend’ (doublespeak for another budget cut), it might only be a matter of time before the same bean counter decides to charge wardens for the privilege of cleaning those toilets, as a way of attempting to balance the department’s permanently overstretched budget.

So, if this sounds like your sort of gig, you’d better be in quick!