Geoff Spearpoint — Backcountry Tramper and Hut Advocate

by Sam Demas

(Note: this is part of the larger work New Zealand Huts: Notes towards a Country Study)

After a lifetime of tramping, Geoffrey Brian Spearpoint is steeped in the NZ backcountry, and in Kiwi hut and tramping culture.  Embodying this culture, he is known as a hard core back country tramper who is not the least bit elitist.  When asked about a logbook comment “looks like another hut lost to the tourists”, he looked genuinely pained. He said his priority is that everyone, Kiwi’s and tourists alike, have the opportunity to experience the joys of tramping and huts.  Strong and sprightly, small in stature, he has an elfin glow.  With a gentle demeanor, he is clear about his views while open to new ideas.  Clear-sighted, Geoff seems to think outside the box. I read an account in which he was praised for his work on a Search and Rescue Team for discovering the footprint that provided the clue to locating a lost child: Geoff is the only one on the team who crawled under the fallen log (everyone else went over it).  There, in a child-sized space, he spotted the small footprint, which clearly pointed the direction in which the lost child was finally found.  Everyone in the tramping community seems to know and admire Geoff; the most common terms used to describe him are “inspiring” and “authentic”.

 

While traveling in NZ I kept hearing stories and reading about Geoff, and was delighted to finally get a chance to talk with him briefly at the end of my trip.  As an outsider looking in, this post is an amateur’s attempt to introduce to a U.S. audience a genuine and beloved exemplar of Kiwi huts and tramping.

 

Spearpoint’s journey to becoming a fulltime professional tramper, photographer and writer — and his emergence as a legend and inspiration in NZ backcountry circles — is that of a modest, practical and resourceful guy who steadfastly followed his passions.  Over the years he quietly became an archetypal tramper and an effective advocate who seems to me to channel deep currents in the Kiwi psyche.

This is the story of a young man early enthralled by bush-whacking and camping in trackless NZ

hills and mountains, who later in life developed a deep appreciation of the human dimensions of wilderness as embodied in backcountry huts and tracks.  In conversation he waxes lyrical about hut pleasures such as reading the hut log books as records of the cultural memory of the hills: who was there? where did they go? what did they observe and value?  He talks about Kiwi’s as still stuck in thinking like a pioneer society: holding onto a “puritanical streak” that wants to restore segments of nature to its earlier state, as a kind of lost Garden of Eden.  He feels that this line of thinking about conservation results in his country in general and the NZ Department of Conservation (DoC) in particular losing track of the place of people in the backcountry.  In his advocacy for thoughtful valuing of the human presence in the wilderness there there is resonance with thinkers like William Cronon and of Geoff Park.  The full story of how Spearpoint got to his views on the place of humans in nature is beyond the scope of this brief profile.  But we get hints from the story of how he found his calling as a tramper, writer, photographer, and voluntary hut maintainer who shares his experience with others through creative work.

As a school kid Geoff started out camping in the Rimutaka hills near Wellington, then soon moved on to tramping with the Hutt Valley Tramping Club, of which he is a life member.  The high peaks of the Taurarua Mountains quickly enamored him of adventurous off-track trips and mountain climbing.  When leading the “fit” trips for HVTC, his bone-tired mates would groan when he’d lead them right past a comfy hut and up above the bush line to camp out for the night.  He emerged from his youthful apprenticeship in the rugged and moody Taurarua Mountains well prepared and super keen to explore all places without huts and tracks.

A child of the 1960’s and someone who has chosen his own path, Geoff was declared medically unfit by the military for compulsory military training despite being very fit and active at the time.  He left the Wellington area at age 20 and traveled, tramping and climbing incessantly, including some expeditions overseas, occasionally being away for up to a year.   Photography was a passion from his childhood, inherited from his father and tramping friends.  He initially trained in microbiology at the National Health Institute, but found the work too constraining – he needed a job that allowed freedom to tramp for extended periods. The same was true of his stint working at Mt. Aspiring National Park.  So he retrained for a job in the printing industry, in which he worked for 25 years.  This gave him time off in summer to keep on exploring the mountains and bush while also holding down a job to pay the bills.

His first book, ‘Waking to the Hills: Tramping in New Zealand’ published in 1985, described a number of NZ tramps and featured his photography.  An avid user of ‘Moirs Guide North’, Geoff soon discovered that it was getting out of date; there were inconsistencies and errors that needed correcting.  In the 1990’s he walked all Moir’s walks to produce a new edition.  As editor he ended up essentially re-writing the book, and later went on to produce two subsequent editions.  Over years of on-the-ground research he discovered many remote and largely forgotten huts.  And he developed an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the extensive NZ tramping infrastructure of huts, tracks, bridges, trail heads and signs.  He came to a visceral appreciation of how the nation’s extensive network of small huts had evolved in a ways that shaped the Kiwi tramping tradition of connecting these huts to create an endless series of bespoke tramps in the backcountry.  And he developed a strong determination to help preserve that tradition.

When DoC was created in 1987 by merging several land management agencies, it became responsible for a sprawling infrastructure of bridges, tracks and something like 900 huts (no one really knew exactly how many existed!).  Maintaining this inheritance entailed huge logistical and organizational challenges, and the agency had an inadequate budget.  This came to a head in the wake of the 1995 Cave Creek tragedy (14 people, mainly students, died when a viewing platform collapsed and pitched them into a deep gorge).  DoC threw itself into a comprehensive program of assessing the safety of its infrastructure and re-inventing how it could responsibly maintain so many huts, tracks, bridges, campgrounds, picnic areas, etc.  This was a massive and complex process that resulted in much very good work along with some quite controversial decisions.  (NB: these last five sentences are a vast oversimplification of a complex series of analyses, conversations, decisions and actions that took place over a period of years; for more detail see Shelter from the Storm and web sources like How the Cave Creek Accident Shaped DoC).

Geoff and many other avid backcountry trampers became concerned that DoC was taking an overly bureaucratic approach and was not sufficiently valuing traditional modes of access to the backcountry.  Specifically, decisions were made to decommission lesser used or structurally compromised bridges and huts.  Increasingly, it appeared that priority was going to front country, tourist tracks at the expense of more remote infrastructure.  Geoff wrote a highly critical piece entitled “Idiot Winds, ‘Resolving’ Safety Issues on the DoC Estate” (Federated Mountain Clubs Bulletin no. 130, 1997) based on an apparently needless and wasteful decision to tear down a bridge over Strachan Creek.  Using this example Geoff’s article gave voice to widespread concern about DoC’s directions:

DoC has been driving the high standard tourist track-barrow for some time now. DoC’s own figures clearly show that the primary beneficiaries of that policy have been people from overseas. […] I have no problem with that except that DoC then says it has no money to maintain traditional recreational facilities for NZers in the hills. It clearly has the money which, by its expenditure, it has simply prioritized for the tourist industry, which I find completely unsatisfactory. The Conservation Act states very clearly that the Department should actively foster recreation while only allowing for tourism.

Soon Helen Clark (an avid tramper, leader of the Labour Party and later Prime Minister) was asking questions about some of DoC’s decisions and priorities.  In the end, the Cave Creek  tragedy and the public response to it helped precipitate, among other things, a new phase of voluntary action among trampers. Groups such as the New Zealand Deerstalkers, various tramping clubs, and the online cooperative Permolat, of which Geoff is a Trustee, mobilized to “take on hut and track maintenance and other tasks that DoC is no longer able or willing to do”.

Geoff’s advocacy and his personal example of maintaining remote huts helped catalyze this robust and extremely constructive grass-roots movement.  Within this emerging framework Geoff has lead projects restoring the Tunnel Creek Hut, Roaring Billy Hut and Thomas River Hut in South Westland. He supported the Canterbury University Tramping Club project to restore Avoca Hut near Arthur’s Pass.  His practical guide Adopting a Home in the Mountains is a great example of the kind of hands-on, common sense, hard-work approach he advocates and personally models.  His approach is generous, forces you to think clearly about the issues, and is quietly insistent on doing the right thing.

Inspired by Geoff and many others, DoC and its friendly critics in the hut community have indeed done some very clear thinking and have taken creative action, towards doing the right thing. For example, after years of discussion DoC financed a Consortium set up by national NGO’s Federated Mountain Clubs, NZ Deerstalkers Association, Trail Fund to support and fund volunteer efforts to maintain tracks and huts for three years.  This was very successful with 4 to 1 benefit compared to department doing the same work.  Now, the NGOs have set up an independent national organization on a permanent basis to continue this work, the Back Country Trust, and DoC continues to provide ongoing financial support.  Geoff is Deputy Chair of this group and his work exemplifies its mission.

Meanwhile, Geoff keeps on writing, tramping, photographing, and organizing. As the printing world of his day job started to change dramatically, he put more time into his writing and voluntary hut projects.  He is in the hills maintaining huts when he can, but he has also been involved in other outdoor activities.  He was a guide on the 2004 TVNZ series ‘Explorers’ and in 2012 and 2013 he was the guide and advisor to the TVNZ series ‘First Crossings’.  In addition to producing a steady stream of articles for tramping club publications and other journals, he has co-authored ‘The Canterbury Westland Alps: A Climbing and Transalpine Guide’ (2010), and ‘Shelter from the Storm: The Story of New Zealand’s Backcountry Huts’ (2012, with Shuan Barnett and Rob Brown) and ‘A Bunk for the Night: A Guide to New Zealand’s Best Backcountry Huts’ (2016).

 

In the past few years formal recognition of his service to the nation has followed the widespread informal recognition that he is, as Hugh van Nordeen put it, “a man who has major mana (Maori term for influence, authority) who inspires other to action”.  He was awarded the Queens Service Medal for his “contributions to conservation and outdoor recreation in New Zealand through writing various books and maintaining hut facilities.” And in 2016 he received the New Zealand Alpine Club’s Outstanding Volunteer Award.  The commendation he received with this award says it best:

 

In recent years, Geoff has worked to maintain, paint and restore Department of Conservation huts, sometimes providing equipment, materials, paint and helicopter costs out of his own pocket rather than relying on funding that could be put to use elsewhere.

His credibility and authenticity have inspired thousands of like-minded trampers across New Zealand. Dozens are following his example at a time when the Department of Conservation has been forced to reach out to volunteers and community groups to do this type of work. Geoff’s efforts have helped to elevate voluntary hut maintenance from an idea into a movement.