For some Walk1200km participants, the sights they see along the way power their walking journey as much as the distances they cover.
Sue Graham’s infatuation with fungi borders on the obsessive. “Sometimes my enthusiasm gets the better of me. I’ll be charging along a track, constantly scanning the environment for fungi, and lose my footing. It has led to a few falls, fortunately resulting in nothing more serious than an egg on my forehead, a bruised body and ego.”
Sue, now 69, first became enamoured of fungi “last century” when she started noticing more than just the track ahead. As a younger, hardout backcountry tramper, she wouldn’t have stopped for anything. “It was all about how much I could haul up the mountain, stopping at the view, and returning.” These days she’s still capable of a challenging multi-day tramp but is prepared to pause – but only for fungi. Then it’s out with the phone to capture her discoveries to share with others on iNaturalist.
Sharing her finds is important. She likes having them identified and gets a kick out of introducing others to fungi hunting.
What is it about fungi that grabs Sue? “They’re so perfect, so varied in type, colour, size and form. They are often half hidden and it’s a delight to make a discovery. Mostly though, it’s about the job they do – the earth couldn’t survive without them.”
Sue joined Walk1200km “to keep up the momentum” between tramps and “step out the door when it doesn’t feel easy”. She decided to count walks around the farm, setting up fences and shifting the herd. “I was amazed to find there are fungi to spot in the pasture and woodlots.”
The extra kilometres she’s walking to increase her tally have meant exploring new ground and hence finding more fungi, some rare, and she is intent on grasping any opportunity to immerse herself in “fungified nature”. The archive of fungi photos she has amassed since the 1990s will have to be sorted another day.
Not many walkers pause to study old mossy gateposts or half-buried machinery parts, but Winsome Brown does. She thinks her rather unusual interest – “noticing evidence of human attempts to impose order on the landscape” – arose because she’s innately curious and fascinated by history.
Winsome can pinpoint when she got hooked: “I saw a rusted tangle of fencing wire beside a bush track near Akaroa and found myself wondering, ‘What was the story behind this? Who farmed here? What was their life like? Why did they let nature reclaim the spot?’”
She is drawn to “little pops of history” and acknowledges she can become a little obsessed. For instance, while on a tramp from Mason Bay to Freshwater River on Rakiura, she pondered the history behind Island Hill homestead and the remnants from its early days as a sheep farm. Back in Oban she spent three hours in Rakiura Museum Te Puka o Te Waka reading everything there was on the place and its people.
Until now Winsome has concentrated on evidence of colonial settlement, but she aims to widen it to include “more traces of Māori presence on the whenua”. Nic Low’s Uprising has inspired her to start observing with a fresh perspective.
Winsome is into her fifth year of Walk1200km. “It definitely gets me out more and I venture further. My interest affects how I walk. I stop frequently to observe and take photos – much better than plodding along blindly!” She plans to showcase her discoveries from yesteryear in handmade books – another interest that should tie everything together.
Thea has become addicted to noticing and photographing what’s at her feet, an interest that developed when she moved to New Zealand from Germany in her twenties and “fell in love with the backcountry and tramping”. While covering almost 2000km all over the country in the first year, Thea became acutely aware of the differences in the surfaces she was walking on – the base material, the textures, patterns, colours and “the hidden details you don’t notice unless you’re paying attention”.
She hasn’t confined herself to the wilderness: “Inner-city pavers and road markings are as worthy of capture as patterns in sand, the colour of lichen or the shapes of rocks.” She records what she observes with care. Standing tall, she aims the camera straight down and always includes her boots in frame for scale and consistency. The hundreds of photos gathered over 10 years have become precious memory joggers, “little snippets from where I once stood on one of my walks”. She marvels at how “beautiful and diverse” they are.
Thea’s “rather niche” interest combines her love of walking, her creativity – she also sculpts, writes poetry and draws – and her powers of observation.
Two years ago she noticed life and work were taking over and she wasn’t getting out enough. That’s when she discovered Walk1200km. It coincided with a shift from Whangārei to Akaroa, and she had a long list of local walks she wanted to do and needed the motivation to tick them off. “Walk1200km helped me make walking a daily habit again and get back into nature. My collection of the world beneath my feet is growing rapidly again.”
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