Speaker 3 0:00

we'd actually roast possums and roast them in a camp oven and put stuffing in them and you have to chop their head off with the axe and their claws and the gland under the tail and their tail and roast them in a camp oven. But they were really nice.

Speaker 0:19

Kiro and welcome to the Tramping Life, a podcast about hiking in outro New Zealand, or as we call it here, tramping. I'm jt, and in each episode I chat with people who share passion for exploring this incredible country. We'll hear about the tracks they love, the huts they return to, the lessons they've learned, and what keeps them heading back into the bush. my guest today is Bruce Chopper Ray. He has lived in the bush for most of his life. He's speaking to me from Saxton Hut on the edge of Fjord and National Park, close to the Hollyford track. I'm delighted to welcome him to the podcast. Good day. Good day. So for our listeners, describe your home.

Speaker 3 0:57

The hut was built for deer recovery purposes, and it was built in 1972. And it's basically an abandoned hut that doesn't belong to anyone. One of the beauties of it, is actually not a dock, hu it's on, stewardship land, but it's not actually on the dock inventory because, if it is, they'd have to maintain it and they'd have to depreciate the value and it costs some money. At one stage they were going to remove it, but there was quite a lot of opposition to that. So it has remained.

Speaker 1:29

How long have you been living there for?

Speaker 3 1:31

I first came here in 1982 and I was eel fishing in possum in the winter, eel fishing in the summer in possum, and I stayed here until 86, so I also fished over at Big Bay, I always wanted to come back and I wanted to come back in 2000. So that gave it the eel fishery time to recover and everything. And I had a lot of roadblocks with Doc and everything, and as you do, I finally got back here in 2010 so that's 15 years plus the three years I was here in the eighties. So that's getting onto 20 years.

Speaker 2:04

Let's go back to the beginnings and just thinking about your early days and what were your first memories of being outdoors?

Speaker 3 2:11

Probably what got me interested was the Boy Scouts I was probably in the Boy Scouts for about four or five years I was brought up outside Nelson little place called Brightwater. So I'm not a town person. We did a lot of stuff in the scouts, camping and things like that. And then started exploring and we had Mount Richmond, forest Park and Northwest Nelson, Abel Tasman, Nelson Lakes. And then I went to university, basically 'cause I thought I had the capability of getting some sort of qualification I did a forestry degree and I didn't really wanna get a job in pine trees and I couldn't, get a job in environmental forestry, which I probably wanted to do. I was used to work in the Forest Service and the holidays Track cutting Northwest Nelson that did a couple of animal and vegetation surveys. They were real cool jobs. I couldn't get a job when I graduated, so I actually went back track cutting for the forest service in South Westland. And those days every valley had a possum hunter in it and possums were worth, quite big money. When I was a kid, we used to run round and chase possums, we actually used to skin them and used to sell 'em, but had a wee bit to learn. Some couple of guys were using helicopters to do possums. I thought there must be a bit of money in this. So we got into possum hunting. And then I had to do something to fill in the summer and I was gonna do deer capture because they were worth a lot of money at that stage. And I got into eel fishing quite by accident. I didn't even know if there was a market for it, but I knew where there were plenty of eels. I became a possum hunter and an eel fisherman. On the west coast of the south island from northwest Nelson, right down to Southwest and also down to Southern Fjord.

Speaker 3:52

And you spent most of that time, living in the bush rather than going in for trips. It was easier to base yourself there for the seasons.

Speaker 3 3:58

Yeah. With possums, we'd go in, we might be in for five months without coming out. That was the normal for possum hunting. I think the longest I've been in the bush without coming out is 10 months, but yeah, pretty well full-time in the bush. So were you getting resupplied or were you having to live off the land? A bit of both, when you're possum, we, you actually can eat possums. So we used to spin the. Meat out from that.

Speaker 4:22

What does possum taste like?

Speaker 3 4:23

If you get a young one they're really nice and, I haven't done this for a long time, but sometimes when the first year we were doing it we'd actually roast possums and roast them in a camp oven and put stuffing in them and you have to chop their head off with the axe and their claws and the gland under the tail and their tail and roast them in a camp oven. But they were really nice.

Speaker 4:43

When you were at university you were president of the Canterbury University Tramping Club. So was that when you were doing your forestry training?

Speaker 3 4:50

Yeah, I got into that actually the designation, it was club captain when I went to university, I had a couple of cousins that were older than me and they said, oh, you wanna join the Canterbury University Tramping Club. So I did do that, and we went away on an Easter trip. And we ended up stuck up in Barker Hu for about five days while it rained. And that as far as we got on our trip. I was doing more and more exploring and going away. I'm big trips and things rather than. Doing studying for my forestry degree and I actually failed for last year basically because I did too much bloody tramping had to repeat it, but it was much, much easier because I'd done half of it before. So I did even more. The trouble was I was starting to turn up to lectures and my rubber gum boots and my shorts and my bush shirts and stuff. And I was going quite feral. And I actually even failed it on the second time round and I got a bit sick of me. So they passed me as a whole and booted me out really. I ran into a guy who was a bit of a legend in the carama of before I went to university. And he said to me, he said, oh, would you like to work for me? Down here. And so this guy was Snow Myers and he told me who to get in contact with and I rang this guy up and he says yeah, then we'll give you a job. So they gave us a job for two weeks and we were behind a slasher sort of cutting tracks through bracken to old gold mining sites, up the Wonga pka. So that was real cool. And then August two week break comes around and we said, alright, can we get another job? Working for the forest again? Yeah. Yeah. You're two good guys. There was this young guy called Paul that was working with me and we went to a place called the Proply helicopter Flat, halfway through the Wong pka and they flew us in a Bell 47. And Harry, who was the big boss that gave me the job and stuff, he came in and he said, what do you think of that, Bruce? I said well, a beats, walking Harry. So that's really where it got it started. And I think I did probably about four trips with the Forest Service. They flew us in with the helicopter, And then we started chartering helicopters ourselves and flying in. So that's where the chopper bit came there's a guy that was outta Maro that had an air aircraft called a mo, and there was all these ex meat hunting air strips, and we flew into all of those. We were very lucky in some respects that these air strips were still, operational. And it was before, Dr. Les Malloy got stuck and, made half of these places, wilderness areas. So we managed to land in a lot of these places, like places like Mars Flat, the forgotten, which are now all wilderness areas

Speaker 7:29

Were you going in to do tramping trips or were you going in to do work better? Both.

Speaker 3 7:35

So it was mainly great big exploring trips the beauty of the West Coast was there were very short flight times and there was a lot of venison hunting helicopters around, and so it didn't really cost us that much. I suppose it did, but. A lot of people used to say how the hell can pay for helicopters and stuff? And I said you people go to the pub and spend just as much money drinking at the pub. We did a lot of trips that we flew in and walked out and then it got to the stage. We actually flew in and flew out.

Speaker 8:01

Did things go smoothly or were there any adventures you had on these these bigger trips?

Speaker 3 8:06

If you've added up, I've actually been involved in four. Helicopter rescues. The first one was when I was county university. My first year was there, we got tangled up with a wind slab avalanche or mount ferry queen It was our own fault we set the avalanche off and two guys got swept out about 1500 feet and went over a whole series of bluffs and there was other two of us that managed to self arrest before the set of bluffs and the other three were, escaped from up at the top and didn't get swept away. We could get down easy enough between the bluffs to where these other two were long way below us. And one guy got a bit of a knock on the head and he didn't really know what was going on. It was in, in June, middle of winter. We got him down to the bush line, the other guy was pretty bruised up. Two of us walked out to a hut and got there and after dark, and there was some hunters there. One of the guys kept on walking with one of the hunters, and they got out and they actually got to the ware, uh, springs, hotel and bed. Hell out of the door about two o'clock in the morning and no one answered. They had to break in through the toilet windows and got a hold of a telephone and rang the cops that reefed. In the meantime I was back with these two other hunters and I walked back up with some sleeping bags and got back up to where, the other ones were, and the Air Force rocked on up with an Oro at about 10 o'clock in the morning and winched these guys off. So that made the front page of the Christchurch press. Second one was a bit of a silly one. I just bloody twisted up my back and in the middle of winter again. We didn't have a radio and of course no locator beacons or that sort of rubbish in those days. Two of the guys walked out, went and saw the forest service, they sent a Hughes 500 and a medicine recovery machine. I'm allergic to bee stings and one night I got a bee sting and I was getting a reaction and then I got on the VHF radio and they picked me up with a helicopter and flew me out and gave me a dose of adrenaline and I thought I was okay. The last one, was a bit more serious. It's when I got into flying myself and again, it was my fault. And I asked up a landing and I broke my leg. And that was quite serious really. I had my single side band radio with me and I managed to get a message out. I, crashed at two o'clock, got the message out at three. I had to get my foot out of the wreckage. It was a compound fracture down by my ankle. Thank God I didn't look at it. I was out of action for basically 12 months for that 'cause I lost bits of bone and it had to grow back. Where

Speaker 10:37

you're living at the moment I understand is quite close to Alabaster hut on the Hollyford track, and then there's the airstrip as well that you maintain. Do they still use that airstrip for medevacs or is it people just coming in for for tourism?

Speaker 3 10:49

Where I'm at now. It's a wee bit unique really. When I was here in the eighties, there was a well maintained track, going up the pike round to Big Bay and you could do a loop and there was quite a few trampers, but when I came back in 2010, doc hadn't maintained the track and it's all overgrown and it's in terrible condition. They've still got the markers, but it's just designated as a mark root. So we've gotta getting a lot of hunters and stuff through, not too many trampers. Since about the last 10 years we've got pack rafts, so this Hollyford Pike route is they reckon the number one pack raft trip in, in New Zealand. actually. 'cause you could do a loop and takes you about three, three to five days to do it.

Speaker 11:33

Is the Hollyford track pretty stable or is it getting busier

Speaker 3 11:36

the RAF traffic doubled every year, but I think it's since COVID it, plateaued off. So you might see, say three or so RAF parties. I'm a weak, so it's quite a lot, you only really see the trampers and the jet boaters and from November through to March. A lot of the trampers stay away after that because they know that the hunters will be in here for the roar and a lot of hunters will fly in for the raw. You might have half a dozen different parties in the whole valley. So there's. There's raw hunters everywhere, and there might be up to, five hunters in every party, but there's a lot of deer,

Speaker 12:15

Did you spend COVID Times out in the bush?

Speaker 3 12:18

Yeah. Well That was a bit interesting too because all the raw hunters had gone in and at that stage I had a mountain Radio service was going and they radioed through, especially in out of Tiana and the Fuel and in the WP Blocks and told all these guys that they had to come out and. I knew some of the raw hunters from the blocks further north, the has blocks, had to be pulled out. So I got hold of the helicopter company and got hold of the supermarket at has and said, I don't wanna panic buy and stuff, but can you just chuck me together some groceries? And got the helicopter pilot to bring me down a load of petrol. So they flew that down to get me through COVID and of course, I didn't know how long it would be. I actually rebuilt half the hu here and that was my project, but I later heard. From the Mountain Radio guy that the police had told them that I had to come out and I never knew this. And he said where the hell's he gonna go to, you know, he lives there.

Speaker 13:19

How do you generate power? Do you have solar or you have a generator?

Speaker 3 13:23

It's a combination of the two now. I used my generator. I had run the freezer and then I've got another generator. Ever since then I've really been using, a generator for generating power just for lights. But I had to charge up, a SAT phone, have to charge up a few things, and then I got some solar panels and they were recycled. A helicopter landed on top of them and damaged them, they were gonna throw them away. They were about 40% of the fish that I ran into an electrically engineer guy. And he was the one that, that set me up with starlink and he wired up all my huts. So I've got DC lights and I've got a Honda generator, which uses about half a liter of petrol an hour, which is nothing well compared with a boat, which will use 10 liters an hour. It's nothing really.

Speaker 2 14:08

So you're pretty well self-sufficient?

Speaker 3 14:10

Yes. You do rely on food to get flown in, but you can bring a full helicopter load in and it will last me. Oh, I could probably spin it out for six months with a full helicopter load if I had to. With all these hunters floating around with jet boats, they usually sell me their leftover petrol 'cause they know that I'll buy it off them, which saves me flying it in do you get many

Speaker 14:36

visitors come to see you out in the bush?

Speaker 3 14:38

That's rather interesting because I actually keep a hot book here. I got a map up on the wall and I've put all dots on it from all the different countries where these people come from. I think I was getting about two dozen people that actually came and stayed here. Sometimes they'd stay for about three or four days. Sometimes some of them would come back again. They were about half international visitors and compared with Kiwis, I pretty all got a fair smattering of Europe, a lot of in the states. A couple from South America. There was a guy from India, but he came with another guy that I knew and he had actually climbed Mount Everest twice and skied to the South Pole, I think it was four from China or Hong Kong and Japan. Sort of 50 50 guys and girls. I keep in contact with quite a few of them and it helps when I could email them with the SAT phone or wish them happy birthday and ask them how they're getting on. Now with with starlink I can send the message on Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp

Speaker 15:38

because I see you're quite active on Facebook. There's a Facebook group called poll Glaze Trail, and you put some interesting, yeah, there's some really good heritage huts, some tramping photos up on there,

Speaker 3 15:49

right? Yes. I worked with Max Paul Glaze. He was my boss and he was my best boss that I ever had. When I worked for the forestry track cutting and stuff, that was really the best job I ever had because we were out in the bush, in the forest service, and we'd be out for three weeks at a time, sometimes longer than that. All our food was supplied and we got paid, so we didn't, couldn't spend our money. Max was an absolutely incredible guy and he's still alive. He is got dementia, he's in a rest home, but he's 85 and few of the guys that worked in the Forest Service and few guys that knew Max and I knew Max really well. Pushing for this thing called the pole gauge trail. All it means is just making where Max worked and did all these incredible things and give some sort of acknowledgement what he does,

Speaker 16:41

Is there anything you miss in civilization

Speaker 3 16:44

not really. The way I look at things is it's a better alternative to be out here than being in town. I found that when I got closer out to civilization, I had problems with people stealing my gear, and I've quite, I've lost quite a lot of gear over the time. If I'm out closer to roads and things and that there really annoyed me that's even worse. And dealing with bureaucracy, but dealing

Speaker 2 17:10

with Roxy was pretty bad.

Speaker 17:12

Thank you so much for your time. It's quite a privilege to speak to somebody who lives quite a different lifestyle. And good luck with your continuing adventures in the bush.

Speaker 3 17:20

That's all right.

Speaker 17:23

Thank you so much for listening to the Tramping life. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please follow the podcast in whatever app you use. Tell a friend about it and consider leaving a rating or a review. It really helps more people discover the show. you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you. Drop me an email at the tramping life, one word@gmail.com.