It's 4.30pm on Friday when Alice Brice leaves Sharplin Falls car park to jog to Pinnacles Hut. The track sidles beside a creek and Brice emerges on the tops near the hut an hour and three-quarters later. After dinner and some chats she calls it a night.
She's on the track again at first light following a coffee and an Em's Bar, heading for the summit of Mt Somers. Brice slows to a fast walk on the way up and pauses briefly at the top. By the time she's back at the car, she has covered 15.5km with 1400m elevation. By mid-morning she'll be home in Timaru, in time to spend the weekend with her kids.
Brice is amongst a growing number of Kiwis who fastpack – a combination of ultra-light tramping and trail running. The term was coined by American Jim Knight on a 1988 traverse of Wyoming's Wind River Range with Bryce Thatcher. In magazine, Knight wrote: ‘We were wilderness running. Power hiking. Kind of backpacking, but much faster. More fluid. Neat. Almost surgical. Get in. Get out. I call it fastpacking.’ The pair completed the 160km traverse in 38 hours. Later, Thatcher would say: “We couldn't take a week off work. We got this idea that if we could
