It is calendar season again, and there’s another batch of glamorous wilderness landscapes out - an unspoilt vista for every month of the year. The mainstays of such offerings are the photos taken by Craig Potton and Andris Apse, but nowadays there’s a whole lot more including those images by Rob Brown and Shaun Barnett.
What stands out in these wilderness landscapes is that usually the presence of people are absent. There’s no one walking, resting, watching, or eating lunch. Nor are there huts, tents or tracks to be seen.
Of course, we realise these images are a bit of an illusion, for we fully understand that in behind every camera is someone sitting, waiting, chewing on a muesli bar and shooing away sandflies as they patiently wait for the light to be just right. But these images don’t make the calendars. Rather the signs of people are removed so the view remains uninterrupted.
It is often the same with our favourite spots in the outdoors. Take Piopiotahi Milford Sound. Here we all train our eyes to gaze away in one direction – out across the water towards Sinbad Gully, Mitre Peak, Milford Sound, the Lion, Harrison Cove and Bowen Falls. Any number of books written for the tourist guide us as to how we should feel. For instance, Brian Turner in his Visitors Guide to Fiordland, writes that out on Milford Sound, “beneath the flanks of the Lion or under the towering cliffs of Mitre Peak, time itself speaks loudest of all; waterfalls, forest, mountains and sea, all leave us humbled and hushed by what we have felt and seen.”
But of course this also is an illusion. For in the other direction is found the infrastructure needed for the more than 400,000 people who come here each year. There is the hotel that has definitely seen better days, cafeterias, pubs, endless car parks (complete with native bush that has been carefully pruned so as not to obstruct the view), bus terminals, covered boardwalks and transit shelters. There is the airport, which in the high season is one of the busiest around in terms of take-offs and landing, and there are all the services – diesel tanks, generators, catering deliveries and rubbish haulage needed to maintain this infrastructure – not to mention the seemingly ceaseless expansion of building construction.
But like the calendars we put up in our homes, we know not to look too closely at the place from where we do our looking. Just do an internet image search for “Milford Sound” to confirm that we would rather look out at the pretty picture across the sound.
But, you might say, places like Piopiotahi Milford Sound are not really wilderness. Craig Potton has described them as an aberration rather than the norm. True wilderness is found much further away and only through epic journeys, exposed traverses and dicey crossings. Places like south-west Fiordland’s Mt Inaccessible, the headwaters of the Landsborough, and the tributaries of the upper Perth River.
But perhaps even these spots are not as removed from everyday life as we imagine. In one relatively recent trip I set off from the end of the road south of Haast, and headed off on my own up the Cascade River and over on to the Red Hills, before crossing a series of passes to reach the Dart River via the Beans Burn. At one point I was about three days from the nearest track. It certainly felt like one of the more remote places anywhere. Yet one night I thought to write down all the things I was carrying. What surprised me was how connected I was to a plethora of brands, factories, and materials from all around the globe. As well as obvious equipment, like my pack, tent, cooker and sleeping bag, there was a whole lot more. With me on Stag Pass was my camera’s memory stick (made in Taiwan, code number AC43-5120-0182PO4B0052), a watch bought at Los Angeles airport, disposable lighters made in France, a big black Countdown garden bag for a pack liner, my credit card, foil sachets of sweet Thai chilli tuna, couscous from who knows where, a blue Chinese-made sunhat, and the Pilot Hi Tecpoint V5 Extra Fine Pen that I used to write a list that grew to over two hundred items.
But, like the view of Mitre Peak, because we’re only looking in one direction – outwards – we don’t notice all the stuff we bring with us in these places. The conventional view is that so long as we take all our technology out of the wilderness it doesn’t matter what we bring with us.
I’m not so sure this holds true anymore. I’m beginning to think that what is happening in the opposite direction to the view – behind the camera – is increasingly important. The facilities we build in the conservation estate, the gear we carry, and the things we do in the backcountry all matter. It’s becoming harder to keep separate our love of our most precious places, the ecological footprint of the gear and transport we use to get to and enjoy these places, and the changes underway from climate warming.
It is not an easy task to work through these issues. Maybe that is one reason we don’t seem to want our wilderness calendars to have people in them. It’s as if we are still a little uncertain about what our place within our most ecologically indigenous places should be. Perhaps it is easier to look at wilderness than to be a part of it.
One picture I would include in my calendar for this year would have to be this one of Copland Hot Pools. It’s taken after yet another retreat down Scott’s Creek had me soaking for hours, and where perhaps there’s just a sense that it is OK to see people as an integral part of this country’s wilderness.
