By Kevin de Lange, 07 April 2023
What to do when easter weekend plans fall apart? Spontaneous trip to Te Matawai hut. The plan was to head up on Friday, and maybe go on a side mission to Arete or Dracophyllum on Saturday, then returning on Sunday.
Our start time from the road end was around 1pm - already quite late for a tramp. I recall three main things from the walk up: Daniel complaining about the uphill slog, bonking my head on a big tree branch, and the mud - definitely the muddiest track I've experienced in the Tararuas. We were treated to some decent views on the tops, but were soon walking in the dark for the last leg. Arrival time at the hut was 7:30pm, so we immediately cooked up some dinner. One more problem before bed: the hut was beyond full; people were already sleeping on the benches. We managed to scavenge two matresses to share between the three of us, so it was a cozy night.
Saturday was a much earlier start, Kat and I headed off to our side quest just before 8. Daniel decided to stay at the hut and get some extra Z's. We continued up a muddy and tussocky track towards Dracophyllum, and got about halfway to Arete when the weather strated to turn. Unsure on whether to continue, we had a quick snack break and had a chat about the Swiss Cheese model.
For the uninitiated, the Swiss Cheese model is a way to think about risk management often used in stuff like engineering and security - but equally useful for tramping. It goes like this: your risk model consists of layers of swiss chees slices, where each slice is a prevention or safety mechanism against disaster. Of course, these slices have holes and won't always work. Getting through a few of these layers might be fine but when all the holes align, that's bad. Some of our cheese layers had already been penetrated:
- Weather turning
- No PLB (whoopsie)
- The timing to make it to Dracophyllum and back would be quite tight
- If we needed to stay at Dracophyllum, we had no way to let Daniel know what we were doing (and wouldn't have food for the night)
Individually, these could be managed, but with all of them together, all it would take is a badly sprained ankle for us to be in for a rough time. All that is to say we called it and headed back to Daniel, then walked out a day early.
Remember the Swiss Cheese 🧀