The Best Intentions

A sturdy hardback in solemn green, the intentions book is as much a part of tramping as crossing rivers. And while there was outrage at the replacement of roadside and DOC office intentions books with an online form, the hut books remain. For the most part they contain a simple list: party members, hut ticket numbers, and dates. All essential should someone go missing or try for a free stay. But it’s the wider space of the comments section where things get interesting. These comments can be petty. In backblocks Canterbury someone had written: “You left rubbish in the hut” with accusatory arrows to the entry before. Sometimes they’re puerile. Who are these trampers who write smut or draw cock and balls? I’ve never met anyone on the trail who seems so strangely immature.

Perhaps the most interesting hut book I’ve seen was in Kime Hut, high in the Tararuas, too high for firewood. Three of us were whiling away a chilly evening there playing cards while wrapped in our sleeping bags. Eventually the game became monotonous and we looked to the intentions book for entertainment. It didn’t disappoint. Humour came from the two clowns who wrote that they had gone there, to one of the more remote and difficult huts in the ranges, so they could “meet chicks.” Drama was the entry worried about a tramper seen and passed that day, but who never appeared at the hut. This story had a happy ending. The missing tramper herself wrote the next entry. She thanked the others for their concern, and explained that she had taken longer than had hoped and so spent that night camping on the tops. Around all of these were the usual: “Great spot” “Too cold” “A bit gusty.” And finally, scrawled in the very back of the book, in the flyleaf rather than the official sections was the bizarre message: “If I was the last person on earth and I saw a woman I would kill her.” Who was this maniac? Could it have been the pair there to meet chicks? The thought of a lone tramper, especially a woman, being stuck in this remote hut with this person was chilling.

The next morning, before leaving we went to leave our own entry - just the usual record of dates, numbers and names. We were shocked to find that someone else had been here. He had come and gone in the time between our going to sleep and our waking, a “hut bagger” intent on visiting every hut in the region within the weekend. We had not seen or even heard him. His brief entry, two lines in that intentions book, was the only proof he had ever been.