THE FUN BUSINESS OF HUT BAGGING
During the depths of last year’s Covid-19 lockdown, while the rest of New Zealand was baking banana bread, Auckland tramper Geoff Mead was busy working his way up and down the country, following scores of tramping tracks that led to hundreds of huts.
Mead’s lockdown journey was undertaken purely from home, I should add. Taking out old maps he’d collected since he started tramping in the 1970s, Mead carefully retraced more than three decades of tramps, Then he dusted off his boxes full of old tramping diaries and photo albums, all in an effort to jog his brain and work out exactly how many huts he’d visited during a lifetime in the bush. This wasn’t a purely nostalgic (or pointless) exercise, however. This was serious business.
“I DON’T LIKE TO GET INTO THE NUMBERS GAME. I’M HAPPY TO HAVE MY TALLY RECORDED AS ‘LOTS AND LOTS’.”
- Mark Pickering
Mead was on a mission to record his hut tally on a website dedicated to the somewhat obscure sport of ‘hut-bagging’. On hutbagger.co.nz trampers are invited to create a profile and start ticking off huts they’ve ‘bagged’.
When Mead sat down with his maps, diaries’ own Shaun Barnett with 880 and a prolific but mysterious hut-bagger known only as davetv, who’s notched up an astounding 1081 huts. Ironically, New Zealand’s likely top hut-bagger is not a member of the hut-bagging website at all. Mark Pickering, author of many tramping books including Huts: Untold Stories from Back-Country New Zealand, has likely visited more than 1250 huts, but he shuns the term ‘bagged’.
