The first time I walked up Mount Owen, I horrified my boyfriend by curling up beneath one of its famous water-riven karst outcrops and insisting I needed to sleep. We’d broken up six months before, and had just gotten back together to give it another go. That morning, we were both questioning our life choices.
The previous day had been fine – a decent seven hours of walking, climbing a ridge through mountain beech, sidling along a rocky cliff streaming with water, and clambering up a dry riverbed to Granity Pass Hut, a simple 12-bunk alpine hut just past the treeline.
But we’d bickered all morning as the sun rose behind us and we hiked up the massif towards the summit, through the bronzed alpine meadow known as the Hay Paddock, past still mountain tarns reflecting the sky.
It was beautiful, but I was getting slower and grumpier, and finally announced I needed a lie-down in the tussock.
He looked at me, aghast. He really wanted to get to the top – at 1,875 metres, Mt Owen is the highest point in Kahurangi National Park, which covers the north-western corner of the top of New Zealand’s South Island. The views are majestic. I no longer cared.
“Go,” I said, waving weakly from my spot beneath the sun-warmed rock. “It’s sunny. I’ll wait here. I’m fine. I’m just so tired.”
He stood over me, considering.
“This is not a place to nap,” he said, and hauled me up like a cast ruminant and prodded me towards the top.
You do need your wits about you on the glaciated marble karst of Mt Owen. Full of slots and holes, its insides are riven with caves, some of the longest in the world. To get to the top, you have to spend a couple of hours hopping from rock to rock across sharply carved cracks. A fall would require surgery or a body bag, and like all of New Zealand, the weather can change suddenly.
Eventually, I made it. I collapsed on the smooth grey rock and watched other trampers bound about taking pictures. I lay on my pack and stared into the layers of bluish mountain ranges, hazy in the January summer heat as my boyfriend grimly prepared himself to spend the rest of the day coaxing me back down to the car, imagining lots of pack-carrying and whining.
But on the way back down, I came right – and when we were sorting out our rubbish at the carpark, I realised what had happened. The freeze-dried meal I’d had for breakfast, a product sample from a friend, had actually contained two servings of high-energy scrambled eggs, bacon and hollandaise – about 1,600 calories. No wonder I was comatose; I’d had a Christmas dinner’s worth of rehydrated eggs before trying to stagger to the summit. I showed him the packet, and he just shook his head.
Naomi Arnold is a senior longform journalist at RNZ and author of Southern Nights, a story of New Zealand astronomy
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