Stopping trail becoming a victim of its own success
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John Birch is 250 metres short of having walked the entire 3000km Te Araroa trail, and wants to prevent its popularity from turning hikers off.
“The trail could well become a victim of its own success,” said Birch, who chairs the national Te Araroa Trust.
“Numbers increase, it starts to get bad press, you could go from increasing numbers to just falling off a cliff because the foreign walkers start to say they’d rather just do one of the American trails.”
Birch put this in a “somewhat uninvited” sustainability paper he wrote for the board soon after joining - he became a member of the Waikato Te Araroa trust, then got onto the national trust and became the chairperson within months of walking the trail himself.
So before he goes back and walks the last of Princhester Road, near Te Anau, he’s on a mission to turn Te Araroa into the first regenerative walking trail in the world.
He didn’t finish the trail because of a well-meaning group who gave him a lift. They went a little too far, and Birch missed the end of the trail.
“It does get under your skin a little bit.” For now he’s busy trying to give back to the trail, with a strategy he’s devised to make it fully regenerative.
“My definition of regenerative is that the trail and the walkers give more than they take. So at a granular level, everyone is making more contributions, and leaving the environment and the community better than when they started,” he said.
“We need to understand the trail capacity and somehow control numbers. Not by restricting, but through encouraging. So that we don’t get big numbers going through areas and landscapes that can’t accommodate them.”
“We’ll probably try and find some tools that allow walkers to see how many walkers are ahead or behind them, so that they can slow down or speed up.”
The national board has three regenerative initiatives already running. Tree planting has started in the South Island, as well as wilding pine control work in the Mackenzie Region. Storyboards are also being put together with help of local iwi to educate walkers on what they’re seeing.
“To our knowledge, we’re the first trail that’s gone out and specifically said we’re going to adopt an overarching strategy of regeneration. So the first and the hardest part is actually scoping what that means,” Birch said.
“And that isn’t easy because you don’t want the scope to be too narrow, but you don't want it to be too wide. But I think we’ve scoped it pretty well now.”
The board is in the process of merging the regenerative strategy with their overarching strategic plan, as well as identifying “low-hanging fruit” of regenerative initiatives. This includes data collection, Birch said.
“We’ve only had limited data so far, and without that it’s quite hard to pinpoint where you can make a difference.”
If you’d have asked him four years ago, Birch wouldn’t have bothered with all this, he said. It was always a pipe dream to walk the track, but once he did he couldn’t get it out of his head.
“There’s no one reason why I became passionate about it. I suppose the best reason is, I think it’s cool. I do honestly think it’s really cool that we’ve got a trail that runs from the north of the North Island to the south of the south.”