Ranger’s legacy of comfort
In this edited extract from Shelter From the Storm, Shaun Barnett backgrounds Lower Gridiron Rock Shelter and Upper Gridiron Hut in Kahurangi National Park.
Since the earliest humans arrived in New Zealand, rock shelters and caves have provided shelter. In the mountains, gravity – perhaps helped by an earthquake – periodically loosens large boulders, sending them crashing down until finally they lie at rest on the valley floor.
Most are useless for shelter, but occasionally one comes to rest in such a way that the underlying space is sufficiently accessible and flat to make a dry refuge. Trampers and climbers call these shelters rock bivs. Some are reached by crawling through a cave-like entrance; others boast huge overhangs with expansive views.
In the best rock bivs, resourceful trampers have often levelled sleeping benches, lining them with tussock or fern, and have even made shelves.
Schist boulders seem to have the characteristics most suitable for the creation of rock bivs, and there are well-established examples in places like the upper Arawhata and Forgotten valleys that provide refuge in the otherwise hutless Olivine Wilderness Area of the Southern Alps. In other places, limestone forms a suitable substrate.
Undoubtedly, however, the best-developed rock bivs in the country lie in the Flora Valley of Kahurangi National Park. Lower Gridiron Shelter boasts tiered bunks and a cooking area, and even has a corrugated iron roof extension to maximise the dry area beneath.
Sadly, the swinging bucket seat that once hung from the roof is gone, and while still grand, the shelter no longer has all the bunk tiers either, nor the double bed with headboards.
The nearby Upper Gridiron can more properly be called a back country hut, as it is literally a small hut with a limestone overhang for half of its roof. Light leaks in through a square Perspex window, etched with a forest scene featuring a kea.
Outside, a swinging bench seat provides a comfortable place to contemplate your surrounds.
Both of these rock bivs owe their development to the efforts of Max Polglaze, a former Forest Service ranger. Polglaze stamped his mark on the area in the 1970s, when the NZFS managed it as the Northwest Nelson Forest Park.
When the Forest Service established the park in 1965, many of the area’s tracks were overgrown, even famous ones like the Heaphy and Wangapeka. And so the agency began an extensive programme of cutting tracks, building new huts and promoting the recreational opportunities of the new park, which was officially gazetted in 1970.
Polglaze played an integral part in this development, and his name became almost synonymous with the park. A former deer culler, he displayed all the attributes of a first-rate ranger: practical, energetic, knowledgeable and able to work around the bureaucracy of head office.
Polglaze had already spent some years carrying out track and hut work in the park by the time he was appointed ranger in the Cobb Valley in October 1969. Later, he shifted to the Graham Valley.
Salisbury (or Dry) Rock had long been used as a shelter, first by musterers working the tops of the Tableland, and later by gold miners, hunters and trampers, but Polglaze was the first to realise the full potential of the limestone overhangs in the nearby Flora Valley.
Polglaze recalls: ‘‘No attempt had been made to make it more habitable, however, prior to 1975. It was at best a rough temporary camping spot for one or two people. Me and the boys did a bit of work on it from time to time. ‘‘There was no master plan. It just kind of evolved – rock walling and backfilling to make levels; a fireplace here, a bunk or bunks there; a ladder up to another level and another three bunks; and then, finally, because it wasn’t actually all that dry, a drip-stopping roof.
‘‘One of the great discoveries I’d made in times past was that a piece of one-inch galvanised pipe made a tight driving fit in a 33mm steel drill hole, and as you beat on this pipe with a 6 or 8lb hammer and drove it into the hole, the end would become peened and enlarged, making a perfect head for what was in effect a giant nail. With these giant nails, you could pin heavy timbers directly to rock – anywhere. Or lay out a row of pipes set into rock, from which other constructions could be fastened.
‘‘The roof at the Lower Gridiron is fixed to framing timbers bolted to a line of such pipes, hammered into holes 30 feet [9 metres] up. Looking up from below, you can perhaps still see two names on the underside of the roof iron – Max Polglaze, Dave Shubart 1978.5.’’
In June 1980, Polglaze recycled materials from a dismantled possumers’ hut to complete the Upper Gridiron Hut. When Forest Service bosses later inspected his ‘‘illegal’’ work, Polglaze offered to pull it down, but the order never came. ‘‘They had to growl officially, but privately they liked it.’’
Both shelters take their name from nearby Gridiron Creek, itself christened during the mining era, when a grid of tracks was sometimes constructed in order to locate gold more easily.
Polglaze did not last long after the Forest Service was absorbed into the Department of Conservation in 1987: the paperwork and lack of fieldwork stifled him beyond words. But he has continued to play an important role restoring huts, and now lives in Central Otago. Both Gridiron shelters remain part of his legacy in what became Kahurangi National Park, and form a salute to a style of ranger now sadly gone.