Hazel 0:00

I got swept away in a side creek and just immediately decided that. There was no way I was gonna go into the wider river, and so just fought like anything to get up and I was just grabbing anything I could grab. I had bruises, I think that they lasted for more than a month. My other two buddies managed to get across. And then one of them said to me, I thought you were a goner for sure.

Peter 0:19

So

Speaker 0:26

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.

Jonty 0:46

I'd like to welcome to the podcast today, Hazel Phillips, who is a well-known author of multiple books about tramping, particularly around the region. But she's also written extensively around tramping across the country. So I'm delighted to welcome you to the podcast today.

Hazel 1:01

Thank you, jt.

Jonty 1:02

So I'd like to start with understanding where did you grow up and what were your earliest memories of being outdoors?

Hazel 1:07

I grew up in owa, which is north of Auckland. Or it is actually now part of Auckland since the Super City became a thing however many years ago. But back when I grew up there in the eighties and through the nineties, it was a tiny little hit town and it certainly was not part of Auckland. We lived up on the clifftop between and Hatfield's Beach. And every day we'd go for a swim. In terms of actually being in the outdoors we had two weeks camping at Christmas. And we'd usually go to Nui Regional Park, which is even just. Slightly further north. And that was pretty rustic back then. Just long drop toilets and you pitched your tent and my brother and I would tear around and terrorize other campers and go for swims and pretend that there was treasure in the hills and all that kind of stuff.

Jonty 1:45

And then do you remember what your first multi-day tramp was?

Hazel 1:48

I do remember the first multi-day tramp, but if I go back to my first actual tramp and this probably explains a lot why I never tramped until I was much further on as an adult. I was about six years old and we were on one of those camping trips and my mother decided we would go on a day walk on Hasties track, and what I remember most about it was just being in huge amounts of pain because I had decided to imitate my brother. When you have a brother who's two years older than you, you think he's just the coolest person in the world. He still is pretty cool. But if he did something I would try to copy him, and he jumped off a bank onto the sand and I thought, oh, that looks really cool, and so I'll do that too. And so I did it and I snapped a ligament in my ankle. And my mother did not believe me. She said I was just being silly. And I had to just toughen up and walk it off. And so that, that tramp, my first day tramp pasties track in Northland was the start of some tramping trauma. And so I think growing up I was I was a huge. Huge avoider of the outdoors. Actually. I played sport, I played a lot of netball and lacrosse. But certainly was not into tramping and had no confidence in the outdoors. Not just the tramping trauma, but I think sometimes if you just somehow absorb the idea that you don't have the ability to do something, then you internalize that so you don't try. So going on school camp and stuff like that was always. A little bit horrific to me. I'm happy to go kayaking or tramping or something like that. So the first time I ever actually went on a Multiday, T was Milford. I had decided, it was something I probably could do when I saw my friend Lisa, who's much smaller than me, I'm quite a short human and she's even smaller, and she did it unguided and carried all her own stuff. And I thought if Lisa can do it maybe I actually could. And so I signed up with a group of people I barely knew and Ry went to do the Milford. Unfortunately I did that with zero training and no idea about tramping. And again, that was quite a lot. Of significant tramping trauma. And when I went back again many years later and redid the mil, that I was surprised by how easy it was, but at the time I thought I was dying.

Jonty 3:41

So given all the trauma early on, when did you finally start to enjoy tramping?

Hazel 3:46

I think maybe I'm a little bit one of those sick people who enjoys type two fun. Not fun at the time, but fun in retrospect. And I think also when you have grown up thinking that you're really incapable and then you figure out that you actually can do these things, it's just sort of shoe leather and effort. There's something quite alluring about that. Usually on most tramps, even now, I think, why on earth am I doing this? I'm questioning my life choices. This is so hard. I have this terrible internal negative voice. You should just give up. Why? Why are you bothering? This isn't for you. And then later on you'll get to a heart or get home or something and I'll think, oh, cool, that was great. What should I do next? So it's some sort of sickness. I think it's a bit of an affliction.

Jonty 4:24

So would've been some of your more memorable trips?

Hazel 4:26

Sometimes I think they're memorable for the company more than for what you are actually doing. So one of the ones that I think I hold quite dear is Harper Pass. So I gathered together a group of victims and said to them, look, there's this track and I think it'll be awesome. And off we went. I think it was New Year's. One year there were about six or seven of us on the trip. And yeah, Harper Pass is not particularly challenging. It's quite historic because it's named after Leonard Harper, who's the first European to cross the divide. And, the first day you go up the Tara Macau River and it's just. Constant river bed all day and you're looking at your feet and navigating rock after rock. And I remember getting to that, the hut that we were staying at, that's, much further up. I can't remember the name of it. And I looked at my friend Jeremy, and I said, Jeremy, what did you think of today? And he just looked at me absolutely dead pan. And he said, I thought today was stupid. And so we decided it was the stupid tramp, and it was just hilarious. One of those things you just have to be there, but I remember, swimming in rivers and just having a hilarious time. And so things like that can be just really memorable for the company or just being silly or something. But for scenic, tramps, obviously I'm gonna tell you that anything around Rupe who is fantastic because I'm a rupe who addict and obsessed. And there's so many things in the south island that I probably don't even need to start listing them off. But any of the great walks and things like restart and wilkin, young and tramps like that are amazing, but for personally memorable things, I think it's often things going wrong or just there's something specific about it. I've done a couple of kind of nine or 10 day solo trips that I've done to challenge myself. Not always. Everything goes right and you meet some interesting characters. One of the trips I've written about some of the stuff, but I went to do a long trip through the car worker in UA range. And the first day I realized I'd forgotten my second pair of socks. And that wouldn't have been so bad if it was summer or the edge of summer. But it was I think it was the 1st of June and it was pretty cold. There was snow predicted and I remember standing there. I had dry feet when I realized, and I was standing there at the edge of the moca River, just about to walk to Amaru Hut, and I looked at the river crossing and that just triggered. The realization that I did not have a second pair of socks with me. And this was the first of nine or 10 days. I can't remember how many. And then I was meeting my friend Nate on the other side. He was gonna drive down from Auckland and we were gonna do a whole other, I think, eight day loop from there. And so if I didn't just keep walking, I was stuffing up the trip for both of us, so I did keep walking in actually at Amaru had I found a whole lot of socks hanging up. That solved the problem.

Jonty 6:54

Now your books have quite a high body count, I have to say. There's quite a lot of deaths in the Outback. In some tramping related, some plane crashes, all sorts of things happen. What's the nearest that you've come to? Any kind of near or actual disasters other than the missing socks?

Hazel 7:09

Yeah. I do love a good high body count. I think it reminds you of all the things you should do to stay safe in the wilderness, and hopefully I learn from those lessons. Thankfully I haven't had any really terrible things of, hitting the PLB and anger or anything like that. Touch wood. But once I have. I self arrested down the rad face of that the snow pack just gave way underneath my feet. And next thing I knew I was just hoing down a fairly steep snow wall. And in my head at the time, looking back on, the topography of the area, it was completely fine. I could have just, let myself. roll. But at the time in my head I was thinking, I'm heading for the Cradle lake. when you take a Snow Craft course, you learn how to self arrest and all these different positions. And just after I started sliding, I thought, oh, this will sort itself out. Then I thought, it's actually not going to, I've got to do something, and then all the training kicks in. Self successfully and embarrassingly, there were quite a few people who seen me from afar who made sure I. And another time when I got swept away in a side creek doing the Leslie car track with some friends and it was a, not a really swollen side creek, but I think when you're a short human being, a little bit of water can knock you off your feet really easily. And so yeah, I got knocked off my feet in the side creek and just immediately decided that. There was no way I was gonna go into the wider river, because that was just, It was feeding into, I think it was the Leslie River. And so just fought like anything to get up and I was just grabbing anything I could grab. I had bruises, I think that they lasted for more than a month. I was pretty badly scratched up and stuff. And, um. got up and I was on the other side of the creek and my other two buddies were still on the opposite side that we'd started on and so then they managed to get across. It was fine. And then one of them said to me, I thought you were a goner for sure. And yeah, I had nightmares about that for a few nights and I'll probably have nightmares tonight now that I've talked about it.

Jonty 8:55

Why did they let you go first? Surely The biggest. The strongest. You go first to test the water.

Hazel 9:00

Completely. My mistake actually the three of us went together and we were all holding onto each other. One of them started slipping and I let go and I absolutely shouldn't have let go. But I was of course thinking, we're all going down and I was trying to grab something to something else, yeah, it was my own stupidity really.

Jonty 9:17

That's it's the natural instincts versus the training is often the opposite of what you need to do.

Hazel 9:22

Yeah, and I think those two anecdotes are on either side, right? Like the self arresting was just the training. And I told myself this is what you've gotta do. this is how you hold your ice X and dig it in and get your crampons out of the snow and all that, so you don't cartwheel. And then the other one, it was just a dog's breakfast.

Jonty 9:36

What are some of your favorite huts or campsites?

Hazel 9:39

I think if someone was gonna say to me, I'm coming to New Zealand, and what's the number one? Overnight tram. I should do, I would say ne hut, it's just got everything, it's got the ice falls and the big mountains and, you're above the bush line for a big chunk of it. And it's the joyful red alpine hut, which makes you feel a bit special. Although it can be a little bit of a train station with lots of traffic but you can do it as a day walker and overnight. So I think that is categorically probably the best. Overnight tramp or even day tramp in the country. And then there's the things that are special to you because you just personally like them. So Blythe Hut is one of my favorites. I actually have a favorite bunk if I can go so far as to say that at Blythe Hut there's one bunk that doesn't have a bunk above it all. The other bunks are upstairs, downstairs, and this is just a downstairs one. And there's a big window. It's right next to this big window. And you can look out and see the stars at night. You also seem to get a sunrise and sunset there, and I don't quite understand how that works, maybe being so high on the southern side of, but the sky just gets absolutely lit up so you can get these complete fireball sunrises there. That's pretty special, I think.

Jonty 10:44

you consider yourself a hub bagger?

Hazel 10:46

I am a little bit, I think somewhere on an old laptop somewhere. I have a list of all the huts that I've bagged, but I haven't been particularly committed to it. But I have done some hut bagging when I think about a region. So at one point, this is a very, going back a very long time ago when I had been tramping very long, but I did a bit of a. I decided I was gonna celebrate the fact I'd just ticked off all these huts and I went down to the four square national park. I was staying in National Park and I thought I'll just get some ice cream to celebrate. And I was standing there at the freezer looking at all the ice cream and laughing to myself about something. And this chap who was loading things into the chiller, he said to me, what are you laughing at? And I said, oh, I'm getting some ice cream. I'm just gonna celebrate. I've done all the huts in the national park. And he immediately, he just went, no, you haven't. And I was like who are you to say that? I haven't done every hut? And I said no, I think I have I've just finished one today. And he said no, you haven't. You haven't been to the Secret Hut. And I was just absolutely gripped like this, a secret hut. and he gave me instructions to get to this, and it just sounded very implausible. You go to this place on the road, and instead of going to the left, you look to the right and you look for this gap in the bushes and go through the gap and keep following the track, so the next day I thought I'm off to find a secret heart. I did not think I'd find a secret heart, but off I went and I went to the place on the road and instead of going to the right, I went to the left and I looked and I was like, is there actually a hole in the bush? And so I went up and I had a look. Popped my head down and walked through this hole in the bush, and I thought, this is a track. I keep following the track. and after about, half an hour, 40 minutes or something, there was no more track. And I stood there and I'm looking around and I'm thinking, okay, this is a joke, because There's no heart. And just this track stopped and then I caught a flash of some red through the trees and it's very well hidden. I don't think it was back in the day, but it was very well hidden by so much growth. They've just let the trees grow up around it. It's incredible. And I. Stuck through those trees. And here's this hut which was built by the Tonga Tramping Club very early on. It's one of the earliest examples of a hut in the National Park. And so it's quite historic and the park board back in the day was determined to get rid of it. 'cause they were quite naughty. They built it without a permit. And decided to ask for forgiveness later, or I think Job Blythe was apparently gonna apply for a permit, and then he died and that never happened. And it's gorgeous little hut. It's only a couple of bunk, but yeah. Worth visiting. And so sometimes I take people on a walk and I say, we're just gonna go find a secret in the bush. And people are very tolerant and then, 40 minutes later they're rewarded with the heart.

Jonty 13:15

I saw the photo in fire and ice. It looks beautiful. It's still very vibrant red. It seems to be really well preserved.

Hazel 13:20

Yeah, I think the club has done a great job of keeping that preserved. I belong to it now as a member to support that, that heart. And their main objective is just keeping that going.

Jonty 13:29

So is that kind of part if you join the Tramping Club, you get inducted into this secret hub that nobody else knows about?

Hazel 13:35

You probably could get an induction? I'm not sure. I hadn't asked 'cause I already knew how to get there. But they're perfectly happy for people to apply. To join up as members. Yeah.

Jonty 13:43

It's interesting that was an illegal hut or perceived as an illegal hut. I think I was reading about, is it tga Forest Park or the area nearby where there are many illegal huts? Did the dock remove those or what's the story behind those?

Hazel 13:55

Yeah, so there's one there called 10 Man Hut, and that's a dock hut. And I believe that started as an illegal one and then got handed over to Dock. But what has happened because I said to a friend of mine who works for Dock, that I was amazed that there weren't more legal huts in the national park. And she said no, that not so much in the national park, but that to forest has a real problem. And so there's these hunters huts people have just built, and some of them are very fancy, new fireplaces and color steel roofs and all this kind of stuff. But the impact on the environment is pretty substantial. And particularly when people are digging dams and trying to create new waterways and making their own driveways and things like that, and it changes the habitat and that's not ideal. So Dock has been on a mission to close some of them down and remove them. I think a couple of years ago they went and mapped all of them and then put notices on the door saying, at whatever date this hut will be removed, call this phone number for more information. And in some instances they heard nothing and the hut would still be standing. And in other instances they would come back. The hut was completely gone. Sometimes everything had been taken down and flat packed either. They're doing that for dock removal or they were planning on going in and doing it. Doc got there first. I'm not sure. But a lot of that has been cleaned out.

Jonty 15:07

That's good to hear. We start talking a bit about your writing. So what first inspired you to start writing about your tramping experiences and tramping history?

Hazel 15:14

Yeah. I'd published a couple of books before, so I'd published a history of the advertising industry and a biography of se Bob Harvey with penguin. And hadn't published, hadn't done any books for years. And I had been strategically homeless for a few years. The time period that I described in my book solo and Some of my friends thought that it was hilarious, to, for three years to be sifting around the wilderness and working and being a member of society while also being completely feral in the bush. And they kept saying, you should write about it. And I would sit down and try to write about it, but it just sounded quite boring when you just talking, I did this, I did that. I went here, I trapped this thing. And then I started thinking, there must be stories behind. The place. When you think about the Milford track, on the surface of it, it's just, it's a dock track and you can book it and go and walk it, and that's nice, but it's got this whole history of freedom walking. one of the tramping clubs protested the fact that you couldn't just stay in huts as an independent person. And that's how that track got. Opened up. And so I started thinking there must be all these stories behind the landscape and there must be reasons why huts are called what they're called, or there must be things that have happened and started researching that. And then that to me, made it much more interesting. And then I started just wrapping in history with what I had done. Yeah. And then I was doing a master of creative writing degree at Massey University and Massey University Press's publisher, Nicola Legett. She came to, she did a webinar with the students where she talked about getting published and so on. And she said in that webinar if you've got anything, by all means, send it to me. And so as soon as we got off the webinar, I thought here you go. And so I think I had maybe a third of the book written up at that point. And I had been pitching it to publishers. I think I'd been rejected by about three or four publishers. And Nicola immediately came back and said, yep, I'd love to publish this. And then of course you have to go through this. This process with a publisher called acquisitions where it goes to a meeting where everyone involved in the publication from marketing to sales, et cetera. They all sit together and often there's an editorial board. They look at your proposal 'cause you have to write up a whole proposal as well as actually having a writing sample and a full outline and so on. And then they say yes or no, and you've gotta get pretty wide agreement for something to get through. And then yeah, that finally, that got through. And so I had a publisher

Jonty 17:28

Was the concept or the book solo was that always the intent of the book was to be about solo tramping?

Hazel 17:34

yeah, it was intended to be very much about solo, but also because I was living quite a solitary life by myself, there's that sort of undercurrent to it. I had a place in Auckland and so I'd given that up. And put all my stuff into storage. 'cause I knew I didn't wanna live there anymore. But I didn't know where I did want to live and so this was an exploration of going to find out those things. When you're traveling around and you are staying in different towns and you're tramping and experiencing different areas of the country, I was always looking at. Everything through the lens of, could I live here? Is this my place? I'm not sure. So solo is a quest to find where my home was as well as a lot about solo tramping and then about the history of all of these places. And of course, when you start researching the history of anywhere usually what gets recorded is death. So hence having a really high body count.

Jonty 18:20

And that's how you ended up in uni,

Hazel 18:22

yeah. I just, I love the mountain so much that for me it was a long time dream to have a place there. So that was a huge thing. And when you're living at the base of a mountain you love that's quite a treat, after work, you can, especially in summer, you can get out and get onto the mountain. You can actually, and I did this quite a lot. You can walk into a hut on a weeknight and be out again and back at your desk quite easily at home.

Jonty 18:43

So uni versus national park. What was your trade off there?

Hazel 18:46

Yeah. So I've come to learn, so I thought when I moved to uni that it would be full of really outdoorsy people, like a ika, but for the north island. And I soon discovered it's actually a lot of hermits. And then I'm quite an introverted person as well, I would say I'm in the hermit camp. And then there's a lot of people who've come there, and I say this with absolute love for uni and it's people, but there are a lot of people who've gone there because they love, they've gone to do a ski season and they've really enjoyed the AP pre ski lifestyle. And then they've just stayed because it's what they love and they've really attached to that kind of ski culture and the apre ski culture and everything. So you've got. This really interesting mixture and I discovered that a lot of people who enjoy partaking of the Devil's lettuce, by which I mean smoking dope. And so there's this big sort of dope smoking culture and there's this big hermit culture and there's a few people who just get into the outdoors who I manage to meet and make friends with. But it's a pretty, it's a unique sort of mixture. And then my understanding of National Park, which by the way has been renamed Why Marino, it's gone back to its old name is that it's actually got a lot of very religious people. And then it doesn't really have that why don't know if it has the dope smoking culture that, it's a very small village with a police station. Who knows? But yeah, it's, I don't think it's got quite that same sort of apre ski sort of attitude. I'm not sure

Jonty 20:03

has the town changed much during your time there?

Hazel 20:06

It kind of swings in roundabouts really, because at certain times of year it gets really busy and sometimes of year it gets super quiet. I would like to see o Kuni flourish a bit more and there's some things have popped up recently that have been really good for the local economy. For example, Tero, which is the new bike path, it's gonna go all the way from Turro down to uni. And so the stage one of that is open at the moment and that's really well worth. Going for a bike ride or a trail runner or a walk on. And every time I've done that, it's just been floods of people on it. It's a real attraction and it's beautiful for you come out into the mro campsite sort of area and you get this stunning view up to royal. And then there's also um, which is a bike pass that's gonna connect Marino with, uh. so there's gonna be a missing link there. So at the moment you can bike on the Martin session or Tramway to a certain point and then you can't get through. And so that's all gonna be linked up and once all of that is done, you will be able to bike or trail, run a walk from Wine Marino to tour, which is gonna be quite incredible.

Jonty 21:09

As a local expert, I'm interested in your views on Tonga Alpine Crossing, and what your thoughts are.

Hazel 21:15

Yeah gosh, I could probably pull quite a few opinions outta the back pocket about that. So for a time I was guiding occasionally once a week on the crossing for a drift outdoors. And yeah, got to know the track pretty well. I am very much in favor given what I've seen yet, the amount of rubbish that you can come across. The way that people, especially tourists, they go onto that track just wanting to see quote unquote Mount Doom. So I'm really pleased. There's a lovely, I dunno if you'll call it a po there might be another term for it is in the car park now and there's a lot more cultural information. There are ranges or hosts who will be there at the beginning of the track to give people information about the track and so on. I'd like to think that there's a lot more engagement with, which is the iwi for the area. Hopefully that's all happening, but I'm not in a place to say whether that is or not. But I think limiting numbers is probably the next step. And so they've brought in A permit system and it's voluntary. But that's the way it's, I think that's the way that we're going. And you see the parking restrictions at the Hooker Valley, for example. We've got to do something to manage infrastructure. And I think we are sitting on some pretty old legislation. So National Parks Act guarantees New Zealanders free unimpeded access to national parks. And so you can't charge to enter a national park. But I think it's time that we started really looking at that legislation and seeing if that is still fit for purpose now, because I think in these really high impact areas, it really isn't. My personal thing that I would love to see happen for safety reasons is to redo the track that goes over the top of Red Crater. Now I know historically the track went slightly further. I wanna say to the west when I'm looking at a map and there's much easier route that goes down the side, 'cause you don't get to walk right down the side of that cliff that goes into Red Crater. But I think it's much safer the number of times I've seen people descending from Red Crater and they fall over. And you only need to have that happen and you can't stop or someone inexperienced on. Crampons who does that in a winter situation? When I was guiding in winter, we would never, ever go down there. We'd always go, to the left, further to the left. So that was the original track that was put in by Ralph Harris, who was one of the park rangers. And then people just voted with their feet and went down the route that we know today. And I would love to see for safety purposes and also for ongoing erosion to see that put back to where it was.

Jonty 23:29

So your most recent book is foreign Ice, which we've alluded to a few times. Secrets, histories, treasures and Mysteries of Tonga National Park. So what kind of response have you had to the book since it's being published?

Hazel 23:40

Yeah. People have been really enthusiastic and very kind. no one has contacted me personally and said, I read your book and it was terrible. So that's always nice. These things, take a huge amount of your time and. Life to write and edit and produce. People have been pretty delighted. Some people have said, damn, you, Hazel, I can't put this book down. Which is also, that's one of my main objectives. That's fantastic to hear. But the most interesting thing I think, is you can, fact check and you can research to a certain point and then just never be able to get any further. And of course, after the book's published, you are gonna find out that you've made some mistakes in different places. So I'm keeping a certain copy where I correct all the mistakes. And I'll file that somewhere, maybe the national Library or something like that at some point. And so it's a tato copy. And in that I'm also keeping track of anyone who contacts me and said, oh, I've got this story about such and such, or I'm the person from such and such episode, so there's a famous photo in the beginning of fire ice, of people bathing in the cradle lake, which is now culturally well always been culturally offensive, but now widely recognized as being. Inappropriate. And I said it to the point of not being very sensible. But back then, it was the done thing. It was super glamorous and there's this wonderful photo and there's two women in bikinis and one of them standing there and she's waving to a man in the lake. That lady got in touch with me. Her name is Penny. and she'd actually got in touch with the listener, I think instead. cause they'd done a piece and she said, I'm that person. And then she said, they just completely ignored me. And I thought, this is fantastic. And she said she was working, I think as a housemate or a waitress or something at the chateau at the time. And she was supposed to be working when that photo shoot took place. And she was determined to get on the photo shoot. She thought it was really exciting. And she switched her shift with somebody else, which she was absolutely not allowed to do. and yeah, ended up on the photo shoot and then that's one of the most iconic New Zealand tourism. Images of all time. So that was pretty delightful.

Jonty 25:26

And there's obviously, there's just a huge amount of research and time and effort goes into writing these books. What is your approach and what do you find are the best kind of sources of information?

Hazel 25:36

Yeah, I've made a lot of mistakes over the past few books or the books that I've done, and so I think my research process has gotten better and better as I've gone on. I've learned things the hard way. So for solo I had a sort of a loose concept, and then I was figuring out as I was writing it, whereas fire and ice, I knew at the beginning of it that I was gonna write this book. And so I sketched out the whole framework. For this kind of outdoorsy content the New Zealand Alpine Journal has online archives and they search by keyword and go right back to 18 something or other. So you can go right through time and find every mention of John Smith, which is hugely valuable resource. And then we have this thing called Papers Pass which I think maybe not many people know about, but it's. A digitization project for all of our newspapers, and it's done by the National Library. And so again, you can keyword search old newspapers. So that's an incredible resource for piecing these things together. And then the National Library and Archives, New Zealand both have this wonderful service called Ask a Librarian. And they're very tolerant people. That's fantastic. They'll go to great lengths to find things for you. And so you fill out the form. This is what I'm after and this is why I'm after it, and this is where I've already searched. And then. They've got all kinds of magic tools, and they go off and sometimes find you different things. And then sometimes just tracking people down through Facebook can be handy. So for example, I've got a chapter about the glaciers, and there was a 1950s piece written by a man called Lud, who was from Austria, I think, and he'd immigrated to New Zealand and he'd done all this tracking of the CIAs. And I thought his last name's pretty distinctive. What are the chances, how many critics could there be in New Zealand? His name was. K-R-E-N-E-K. And so I found some critics in Christchurch and sent them a message and said, you're related to this person. And fantastic. they were and sent me photos of him and had a wonderful conversation about their father.

Jonty 27:22

I understand you're working full-time. how do you balance that with research, writing and tramping and getting outdoors?

Hazel 27:28

Yeah. The answer is that doing anything like this where it's a really big project requires you to be deeply unbalanced both in your approach to life and probably unbalanced in the head. And so you have to just dedicate. Large amounts of time to the project. So I think outside of, while I was researching fire and ice, outside of the trips I was actually doing for the book, I didn't do a lot else in the outdoors. And then yes, I worked full-time and actually while I was writing Fire and Ice, technically I was working more than full-time. Cause I was guiding as well as working a full-time job, which is madness. And while I was writing solo, I was doing a master's degree as well. So I dunno, I'm a glutton for punishment, but I find consistency is everything. So if I get up in the morning and I sit down and I do half an hour of writing, I can do about 500 words on the page. I just need to have done, made sure I've done the research. So that process can be quite fast. And I make sure when I. I'm doing the research that I've got everything on the page. I get it all in the right structure in the format, and I've got all the citations. And so when I sit down to write that part really fast and then just making sure that every single morning you're ready, disciplined, getting up and doing that half hour, or if you can manage an hour, and then every now and then, I would do big chunks, take a weekend or something and do big chunks of work. But that's how you get there. It's just a little bit like tramping to a destination, right? It's just step after step.

Jonty 28:44

So your next book you have planned is Great Hearts. First Ladies of Hierarchy Mount Cook. Can you tell us a little bit about it

Hazel 28:51

Great Hearts. It is named after a quote from climber, Constance Starko, and she talks about how some of the female climbers were great hearts who could hold their head up with most male climbers of the day. But other women were ready to halts who were sort of ready to stop at any time. And unfortunately, I, as the author would identify probably as a ready to halt, not as a great heart. So Great Hearts tells a story of 30 early woman climbers and adventurers of the Alki Mount Cook. And so it goes from 1873 when Joanna Harper was the first European woman to walk on the glaciers at Mount Cook through to 1953, which is the first all woman unguided climb of Mount Cook. So it's the. The time period and scope. I didn't wanna go further than that because we, you end up with a lot of people and it starts getting really messy, but I felt like that was a stake in the ground or a milestone, a mountaineering milestone, and a good place to, stop. Each woman has a different chapter and kind of tells her story. Doesn't necessarily focus on the climbs, it focuses on them as people. Because that's where my mind went to is, engineering was a really radical, unconventional, sometimes really unacceptable thing for women to engage in and so what were they like as people that they decided to go out and climb. Mountains and the book doesn't focus on Mount Cook as a summit. So they aren't necessarily women who have all summited Mount Cook, but it's just that particular region. The early days it's going, walking on the glaciers, it's going up a dome, which is a humpy summit at the head of the Tasman Glacier, which you wouldn't even, I think even Freda de Ford didn't bother climbing it. Yeah. And I hope that people enjoy it. I think I was really inspired to write it when I saw how much information there was out there about woman climbers. I covered a few of them in solo, but there's a lot more information out there and. I'd like women now to read it and see themselves reflected in that and be inspired by that pathway that's being carved out by the woman who went before. And just make sure that we honor these unknown histories and untold histories. Like I think when you think women's climbing, everyone knows the name, Freda Dufour. But nobody knows Muriel Pringle, who was the first New Zealand woman to climb Mount Cook. Or they might know Betsy Blundin, who was the first guide to climb to do any high guiding at Mount Cook. But nobody knows. Hilda Hel Dane later held Hilda Williams, who was actually before Betsy who guided on Taranaki and then got a job guiding at the Hermitage. And, she didn't. She wasn't a high guide, high climbing guide, so not quite in the same league as Betsy, but it's just good to highlight those names and make sure that their histories are brought to life.

Jonty 31:20

And not to hold you to it, but what's the kind of timescales it takes to write something like this?

Hazel 31:24

Yeah. so these books are vastly different. Fire and Ice is a monster. It's 130,000 words, and it was more than that. I wrote 10,000 words and managed To cut that out. And then great Hearts. I tried to keep it to 80,000 and it's 90,000. fire ice took me two years roughly to research and write. I had some health issues and had a few chunks of time where I wasn't writing Great hearts. I have been cherry-picking research material for quite a few years, so I had a big file full of information. already been reading about these women, so it was all in my head. been, collecting all this research material for a long time, but I started actually writing it, in May last year. And just submitted the manuscript to the publisher at the very end of 2026.

Jonty 32:07

Have you got a bit of a list of potential future books in mind already?

Hazel 32:10

I'm probably gonna have a break because these things they're really hard on your life and your health and as I mentioned, with being unbalanced, you have to take a really unbalanced approach. And so I have not done a lot in the outdoors, partly 'cause I've been writing and partly for health reasons. And partly the reason I've been writing is 'cause the health stuff has stopped me getting into the outdoors as much as I would've liked to. So it goes round and round in circles. But I've got ideas. I've got so many ideas that it's not even funny and it's hard because I get really unfocused. And so it's the only time that I will be. Pick up a new manuscript, start working on. The next thing from here is once I've got an idea that's crystallized in my head and has really grabbed me Once I realized that there was a book in it, it was actually Paul Hersey who's a mountaineering writer, and I highly recommend If you anyone enjoys books, picking up some of his, he said to me when I'd finished solo, he said the next book, suddenly you'll just realize that you've got enough material and it makes a book. and it's a viable concept, and he was absolutely right. I was just sitting there one day thinking about the Dudley search in the book, which is Brian and Anne Dudley, and they went up for I think a night or two, and they got stuck by a storm and they dug a snow cave and they were out there for over a week, I forget exactly how many days, and I wanted to write that up as a story maybe for wilderness. And then I realized I had all these real pay WHO stories and it all crystallized together, and I thought, I've got enough here to start hanging this all together. That there's a theme of going and finding these things in real life and finding these histories and what's there today. Yeah, so I just went after that. But at the moment, the IDEAS file is very thick.

Jonty 33:39

And then I'd like to end by asking guests about what's in the tramping bucket list. So what, they put the books aside for a while, what's on your list of places to go to?

Hazel 33:47

Yeah. Thankfully I've managed my time to knock off quite a few things on the bucket list, but I would love to do five passes. That would be an amazing route. Definitely have to train up the fitness a bit more. There's a few lingering things that I've just never gotten around to doing. Like ERNs or Burn I've heard is amazing. I've just never done it. And Mount Brown hut, never gotten around to zipping up there. And I think that one's quite iconic. And then a rabbit past would be another one that would be a good kind of challenging, train up and go and do it. I will say what's, if you wanna talk about what's on the reverse bucket list, things I actually really don't want to do would be, you hear these stories of people doing the Dusky or Stewart Island, and I just don't think that's me. There would be so much swearing.

Peter 34:27

So

Speaker 34:30

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.