A community melts away
There’s no bad view, he says, selling it.
The kitchen is going in and a solar array is on its way.
‘‘It is all off grid . . . we’re using a ram pump to pump out water from a spring — which is crazy technology that I don’t really understand.’’
A longtime arts activist, Hawkins is also responsible for the intentional aesthetic content of the destination.
This is ‘‘curated accommodation’’.
‘‘So, we’re working with artists and commissioning work as a way of building connection between people and the land.’’
‘‘Some of that will be sculptural and some of that is inside the domes, like a floortoceiling cutout piece that [Dunedin artist] Anna Muirhead is doing, which is kind of a forest scene from canopy to mycelium level.’’
There’s some remnant forest on the land where they’re planning to commission a surroundsound aural experience made for sunset.
‘‘It’s all very bootstrap at the moment. And we’re leaning pretty heavily on our friends to help us.’’
Having the artists involved provides another layer of storytelling, he says.
Storytelling is central to the FloruitEscarpment Domes approach.
Its membership model, being launched through Pledge Me, aims to keep people coming back — remain financially and emotionally invested, connect, watch the forest grow and be part of the story.
Among the trees at
Escarpment Domes visitors can connect with are extant stands of kohekohe.
Hawkins is a big fan of the large trees and not just because he hadn’t previously encountered them — they don’t grow much south of Marlborough.
Kohekohe have the unusual ability to flower directly from their trunks — all of a sudden, there from nothing, fragrant blooms.
A bit like a metaphor for something.
An odd assortment of insects once occurred in the Blue Stream, which flowed in Mt Cook National Park until 1994, before Lake Tasman formed.
At that time, Tasman Glacier extended to the terminal moraine, there was no Lake Tasman, and the Blue Stream had a nearly constant flow.
The glacial sediment of the Tasman Glacier’s lateral moraine was effectively ‘‘waterproofed’’ by the presence of the glacier, and the Blue Stream retained the runoff from the catchment between the old Ball Hut Rd and the slopes of the Mount Cook Range.
Grasses and herbs lined the Blue Stream, and there were patches of bare glacial outwash sand for over a kilometre on either side of the small concrete bridge that crosses the Blue Stream a few hundred metres south of the Wakefield Falls. Large stones lined its course and many boulders projected above its surface.
During summer, dozens of large carnivorous flies ( Spilogona sp.) and female crabronid wasps (mostly atypical Podagritus albipes) sat on the stones for several hundred metres on either side of the concrete bridge, and watched as caddisflies and mayfly last instar nymphs crawled out from under the stones to the upper surface, up out of the water. There, as the mayfly nymphs’ skin split and the final stage of the insect prepared to emerge, they were pounced on by both Spilogona flies and the competing crabronid wasps, the latter pulling the mayflies out of their exuviae, stinging them to paralysis, and flying with them to their underground nest cells in exposed sand on the sides of the stream, as provender for their young.
But in this sand lived thin, hardbodied wirewormlike larvae of a stiletto fly unique to the area, Anabarhynchus harrisi, which burrowed through the sand and into the underground nests of the wasps, feeding on the contents of the provisioned nest cells.
After 1994, the Blue Stream flowed less regularly and began soaking into its bed a few hundred metres south of the Wakefield Stream fan and upstream of the small concrete road bridge. This part of the Blue Stream has subsequently remained dry and the populations of the crabronid wasp P. albipes have plummeted. The stiletto fly A. harrisi has also become much less common in its type locality, and many of the insects have disappeared.
The associations between the stiletto fly and the various groundnesting solitary wasps in its type locality, the big carnivorous Spilogona muscids, and other unusual insects may have developed over hundreds of years.
Mt Cook glaciologist Dr Peter Chin informed me that the Blue Stream flowed in an old former bed of the Tasman River and, until 1994, had changed little during the previous few hundred to 1000 years. Dr Chin told me that he, similarly, had been surprised by the almost constant flow of the Blue Stream and had also investigated the reasons for its constant nature. One result of its almost unchanging flow was that it had an unusually stable bed. Soon after the formation of
Lake Tasman, the current Tasman River began incising down through the terminal moraine, changing downstream groundwater patterns in the Tasman Valley and resulting in the cessation of the unvarying flow of the Blue Stream south of the Wakefield Falls. Consequently, a unique association of insects has disappeared from this area.
From the mid 1990s, the terminal face of the Tasman Glacier melted and retreated rapidly, forming a quickly expanding (new) Lake Tasman. This resulted in the Blue Stream above the (then) terminal moraine no longer being buttressed by ice from the Tasman Glacier, so that water in the soil could drain away more rapidly during droughts, and the composition of plants and insects on the walls of the Blue Stream changed rapidly, with both fewer species and numbers of individuals present. The Blue Stream lost its oddly regular flow, and its curious, remarkable, and indeed unique association of insects are most likely gone forever.