New Zealand Hut Heroes: Paul Kilgour: story and video
Kilgour Was Here: the story and a video of a hut nut
by Sam Demas
(Note: this is part of the larger work New Zealand Huts: Notes towards a Country Study)
Talking about huts, Kiwis I met often spoke with awe about Paul Kilgour, the Golden Bay tramper who has “visited more huts than anyone else in New Zealand”. We ended our Cobb Valley tramp just ahead of Cyclone Gita and drove to Takkaka, where we hoped to meet Paul and others. Very soon, in talking with Gerard Hindmarsh (whose books are a delightful trove of Golden Bay stories, including some about huts and about Paul) we learned that Paul is his friend and neighbor. We got through to Paul and invited him for dinner or a drink, he turned the tables, inviting us to his house since Takkaka was essentially closing down for the cyclone and he really didn’t want to go out. So we brought along beer and pizza, and Paul’s partner Janet provided a garden salad and a super-delicious southern-style apple pie (she is from Tennessee!). [They met on the Heaphy Track where she was a hut warden, at the end of his “great walk”, but thats another story]. We spent a wonderful evening talking, spent the night in our camper parked in their driveway, and had coffee with them in the morning. A memorable visit from which I learned a great deal.
Paul Kilgrour and Janet Watchman
However, after dinner that night, when our partners had grow weary of all the hut talk and retired for the night, I took out the video camera and recorded Paul telling his story. He was on a roll! What follows is a brief written profile of Paul and a link to the video. You may want to skip the writing and go right to the video at the end of this post!
With his Gandalf beard, bright eyes and glowing good health, Paul has a beatific presence. His elfin whimsy, great energy, and thoughtful, loving affect, make it clear he loves people and is genuinely compassionate He seems the sort of person who can talk with anyone. He connects with people in part because he is quietly alert, endlessly curious, and seems knows at least a little about a-lot of things. For example, trained in the air force as an airplane mechanic, he seems to know lots of folks with planes, a handy thing when getting around in the backcountry. He loves the “old ways” and has great respect for the self-reliant Kahurangi folks who “make do with what you got”.
On track with his Aaran Pack!
Paul does a wide variety of jobs that need doing, and is active in his community. He was involved (along with John Taylor, Tony Hitchcock, Doug Pickup and others) in curating a 2011 exhibition at the Golden Bay Museum on Cobb Valley Huts, is helping to arrange the archives of the Golden Bay Alpine and Tramping Club, and is helping do an oral history of Frank Soper ( of GBTAC’s Soper Shelter fame). Earlier, Paul helped lead a community effort to save the remote Ministry of Works hut, found to be the only remaining NZFS four-bunk hut never to have been altered.
Known in New Zealand for his long walk home, in 2007/08 Paul achieved a long-sought dream to walk the length of the South Island. He did this over two seasons on his way back from doing seasonal DoC biodiversity work in the far south. He often carried provisions for up to 10 days tramping, and finds that when he is in the tramping groove he doesn’t as hungry! Walking 1,546 km over 85 days, for 8-12 hours a day, he met lots of folks, visited many, many of huts, relished the peaceful adventure of it, and enjoyed the kindness of strangers.
Paul at Riordans Hut – photo courtesy Geoff Spearpoint
But the thing Paul is best known for is the number of huts he has visited. He has tramped incessantly for years, and in 2004 he retraced on maps all the walks he could remember and made a notebook listing huts he had stayed in and those he “had cast a shadow on”. After his 2007/08 “long walk home” the number jumped considerably. He is still keeping a record in his neatly kept notebooks. When we looked in March 2018, he was up to 1,174 huts total.
Why hasn’t Paul entered the data into the Hut Baggers website. He says he signed up so he could see what others were doing, but hasn’t felt moved to join in the contest. It would be alot of work; many of the huts he has visited no longer exist, others have changed names. But most of all he isn’t interested in what he calls “hut bragging”. He does keep count and is proud of his accomplishments, but he doesn’t see it as a competition.
One of Paul’s hut notebooks
Has Paul really visited more huts than anyone else? No one really knows. But it the two leading contenders don’t really seem to care. Paul Kilgour and Mark Pickering (legendary Canterbury tramper/author), the two obvious contenders, steadfastly refuse to contend for the title. This puts them in a class of their own!