Hut2Hut Archive
Includes articles/posts transferred from Hut2Hut.info about international topics, as well as some others that are not necessarily up to date or very substantive. These serve as an archive for the hut2hut.info website, which will eventually be decommissioned, but which has formed the foundation for the US Hut Alliance site and will be discontinued.
Note: Limit 20 posts per page, so click below to see more.
New Zealand Huts Country Study: introduction
The purpose of this series of web posts is to provide a substantive overview of the world’s largest hut system. Specifically, the aim is to provide — in one place, free of charge — a sense of the origins, purposes, operations, unique features, challenges, people who care about, and cultural meanings of this amazing, collectively owned system of approximately 962 huts. The hope is to create an efficient point of entry to serious study of NZ huts, with pointers for digging deeper.
New Zealand Hut Heroes: Paul Kilgour: story and video
Profile of Paul Kilgour, a kindly, energetic and intelligently man. 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.
New Zealand Hut Operations: Notes on ten selected DoC hut operations
Notes on ten selected operational issues, with links to NZ DOC manuals, standards and other documents. INcludes track (trail) extent, maintenance and building; waste and gray water management; logbooks; historic huts and conservation; citizen action to maintain huts; and reservations system.
Brian Dobbie: New Zealand Hut Hero
Profile of my liaison to DOC when spending three months in NZ. Brian is an exemplary public servant who has quietly served his fellow Kiwi’s by helping to steer the modern development of their remarkable national hut system. This brief profile attempts to put a face to the name by sketching in some background about a person who works quietly behind the scenes to maintain access to the bush.
New Zealand Huts : Building blocks of the national hut system
Review of key policy and operational principles and documents that serve as the building blocks of the world’s largest hut system. Links to many extremely useful documents providing details on how the national hut system is managed.
Seven questions about the future of NZ huts
As contemporary society evolves, what is the future of the world’s largest hut system? Outlines a few of the questions that most interest Ime and that I would like to discuss further with Kiwi colleagues.
New Zealand Hut Heroes: Rob Brown
Profile of Rob Brown, a gifted photographer and committed activist. He pursues his passions — for writing, art, activism, and partnerships in support of the great outdoors — with vigor on a national scale. These accomplishments — combined with his inherent enjoyment of advocacy, policy and process — make him a real player in the world of New Zealand huts and wilderness.
Pilgrims Progress: New Zealand Hut Peregrinations
Newsy update on our three months tramping around NZ huts and tracks.
New Zealand Great Walks: user perceptions
There are currently 33 Great Walks Huts and 95 Serviced Huts in the DoC system. This combined total of 128 huts constitutes 13.3% of total DoC huts (963). The user perceptions summarized below are from these two hut categories. While a small percentage of the whole system, these two categories attract the most intensive use and controversy.
This summary of user perceptions is derived from two sources: 1. from discussions that I gathered in three months of interviews and travels in NZ, and 2. from the results of an academic survey reported in the article “Tramper Perspectives on New Zealand’s Great Walks in a time of transition” (in New Zealand Geographer, 2017, p. 1-15, by Joe Fagan and Robin Kearns). [
Architect Ron Pynenburg: New Zealand Hut Hero
Profile of architect Ron Pynenburg who has studied the history of NZ huts and has designed more huts than any other architect in NZ, and probably in the world.
New Zealand Huts – How Many and What Kinds?
An attempt by an outsider to convey to other outsiders a quick visual, numeric and organizational overview of the wild and wonderful range of New Zealand huts. The count, or “Tally”, attempts to enumerate “huts” (broadly construed) in categories corresponding to how they are discussed by hut folks in NZ. The description, or “Taxonomy”, briefly defines these same categories and illustrates them with some examples that give a sense of the variety of hut designs.
