A wrap of the biggest stories and best writing about the outdoors from New Zealand and around the world.
It’s going to take a long time for the country to recover from the effects of Cyclone Gabrielle, and for DOC, even accessing the damage is hard work.
The department’s closed large swathes of its land across the North Island, including Coromandel, Kaweka and Ruahine forest parks, and parts of Tararua Forest Park, among many other regions, while it assesses the carnage.
“We’re experiencing things like windfall of trees in the forest across tracks, potentially with hanging trees that might fall at any time,” DOC’s director for heritage and visitors, Andy Roberts, told RNZ. “Plus slips, landslides, rockfalls, bridge washouts, damage to roads on conservation land.
“We’ve been very precautionary just because of the size and scale and nature of it – it really is unprecedented in DOC’s time.”
Roberts warns against people heading into these areas, as anyone doing so not only risks their own safety, but also that of those who might have to find and rescue them. However, he urges anyone who’s encountered damage to report it to DOC. Hear his interview with RNZ here.
One of the all-time greats has died
When you hear that he started climbing before Hillary and Tenzing stepped on the summit of Everest, you’ll appreciate just how far back Allen Steck goes in the annals of climbing history.
The American climber has died at the age of 96 after a long and distinguished career that included many firsts and some truly extraordinary feats.
Among his firsts are the Comici Route on the north face of the Cima Grande in the Dolomites, the now-named Steck-Salathé on the north face of Sentinel Rock in Yosemite, the north face of Waddington in Canada, and Mount Logan’s Hummingbird Ridge – a 35-day gruelling ascent that’s never been repeated.
He was also on the first major American mountaineering expedition team in the Himalaya. Read more at Gripped.
Should South Island ski fields be worried?
Journalist Josh Martin thinks they should be, when you look at what’s happened in the European Alps this winter, and if climate data is anything to go by.
He says ski resorts in Italy, Switzerland and France have had to close due to unusually high temperatures that made it impossible to make artificial snow at times. One resort went to the trouble of using helicopters to fly in natural snow, but even this didn’t do the trick.
A 50-year study of 2000 alpine weather stations over six countries shows that this isn’t surprising, given that snow now arrives later and melts earlier. It’s a trend that’s continuing, and many resorts are preparing to market themselves more as hiking and biking destinations in future.
Martin predicts it might not just be Ruapehu that struggles in future years. Read his full article on Stuff.
Watch a huge rockfall on El Capitan
As if climbing the world famous El Cap in Yosemite National Park, US, isn’t dangerous enough, things like this might happen to really ruin your day!
Luckily no one was hurt in this rockfall, but Alex J Wood, who took the footage, described the noise as thunderous. And it resulted in trails and the closest road being closed.
Amazingly this rock fall was much smaller than the previous big fall on El Capitan in 2017.
