Lights at a hut are like togs in a sauna
Around the country, DOC is upgrading backcountry huts with solar panels and electric lights. But as technology evolves, what are we losing?
Dan Keane writes the newsletter american.nz, where a version of this essay was first published.
Years ago – the early aughts, must've been – I was drinking with an old buddy in a Brooklyn (New York) bar you could fairly call hipster. A Tuesday, maybe. Nothing crazy. We sat and listened to poets or singers or earnest dudes poking at laptops, I don't remember which. Everyone seemed to know each other. Friends watched friends make art. I remember feeling restless, a step outside the crowd, but then I always felt that way in New York. Was my jacket cool enough? Shouldn't I be making art, too? My buddy, though, was purring like a cat. This, he said, is my church.
I thought of him last month when a Kiwi mate and I stomped into Powell Hut, high on the windswept shoulder of Mt. Holdsworth in Tararua Forest Park. Powell Hut is a 32-bed jewel – maybe the crown jewel – of New Zealand's backcountry hut system, which counts nearly a thousand overnight shelters tucked along Department of Conservation trails all up and down these islands. We had wheezed to the ridgeline deep inside a classic long white cloud; now we shed our wet boots in the cloak room, chose our bunks, and joined the trampers already gathered around a cheerful fire. Wet clothes hung on a rack over the stove. The hut's banged-up old kettle was still hot. We poured some tea and made gradually deepening small talk about the state of the weather, the nation, and the world, then set to sorting the hut's ancient, mismatched decks for a game of cards. This is my church.
Then someone got up and turned on the lights.
What? Huts don't have electricity! The whole point of a hut is to spend your aprés-tramp unwinding in the gathering 19th-century dusk, letting patient shadows claim the room until the head torches come out. Powell still has the tin wall sconces you see in many DOC huts, which are both relatively fire safe and warmly reflect candlelight around the room. Last time I was up, previous trampers had left candles stuck in old liquor bottles on the table. When was the last time you ate dinner by candlelight?
A DOC spokesperson has since explained to me that lights, solar panels, and a battery were all installed at Powell way back in 2019, when the popular hut was rebuilt and expanded. I'd first gone up in 2020, on a chilly weekday in August. If I noticed the solar panels out the back window, I didn't guess what they were for. Not a single other tramper arrived to point out the light switch. I lit the candles in the bottles, ate my noodles, read the news on my phone and wondered if the world was going to end. A perfect tramp, really.
The liquor bottles are gone now. One of the wall sconces has disappeared, too. The single, unmarked button just inside the front door is darkened with finger oils but still easy to miss. It's a timer switch like the kind you see in public restrooms. Punch the button and bam — it's a bus station.
They're not fluorescent lights, I don't think. In 2025 they'd have to be LEDs. But LEDs still feel fluorescent to me, in the bad old way. Fluorescent light bulbs will / make an absence of dark / but the light just ain't there still. That was Modest Mouse back in the 90s, before climate change made us ban incandescents. Back when selling out was still bad. Back when there were no notifications or likes, and subscriptions got you an actual magazine you could hold. Our window of the pure and the good is always shifting. I'm old enough to have once declared I would never get a cell phone, and now here we were on the mountaintop, scrolling under the lights. Oh well. It was still a grand time. It was still kind of holy.
Mountains are sacred. Most every culture agrees on this one, or we did. When my partner Jenny and I lived in Shanghai, we made several trips to Jiuhuashan, one of the four sacred mountains of Buddhism. Are we Buddhists? Are backpackers on the Camino de Santiago Catholic? We went up there as curious gringos, eager to bask in a big-tent human reverence for the unknown. Over the years of our visits, however, the Chinese government methodically wiped the place clean of mystery and faith, leaving only the golden Buddha statues. Where the shops once sold incense to devout grandmothers to burn at each mountainside shrine, they now sold toy tanks to tourists, and these noisy wind-up soldiers that crawled on their bellies and fired their little guns. The weird temple in the valley around back, the one that featured wild dioramas of all the gory ways our transitory human flesh can die? Levelled and gone. A sign at the bus stop now declares the entire mountaintop a region of geological significance, as if humans ever climbed a mountain for the stones beneath our feet.
Now DOC ain't the PRC. No one's trying to kill the vibe at Powell or any other hut. There are now lights at some 40 huts across the country, including many along the Great Walks. Shan Baththana, DOC's director of asset management, notes that the department aims to serve a wide variety of folks. 'Many people value getting off the grid and into nature, while others, appreciate a few modern comforts,' he said in an emailed statement. 'DOC recognises the need to provide a range of hut experiences for different users.'
The lights are indeed practical and safe. We were only five overnight trampers at Powell this trip; a 32-person dinner rush up there is surely tricky in the winter dark. Maybe the lights made the solo French woman at the next table feel a couple of clicks safer around two dads and a pint of Jameson? If anyone got hurt, we could've done surgery on the table, at least until the timer switch popped off. The lights only ran for half an hour. Every time they blinked out, one of us hopped up to punch the button again, quick as mice in a lab. Something's been lost here. But what?
Consider the sacredness of the hut church, in five points nailed to the door:
Being out in nature. Powell Hut is four hours' walk from the road – entry level stuff in New Zealand – but there are misty goblin forests up there, plus birds, mud, trees I can't name and unspeakable winds that clean out your soul.
Place. Each hut is a hand-drawn X on the topo map, a set of coordinates lovingly selected for shelter and unique upon the Earth. We say their names like prayers: Blue Range, Atiwhakatu, Totara Flats.
Disconnection. The cell signal at Powell is blazing, better than wide swaths of the valley below. But to call my kids from the hut to say goodnight was so obviously wrong, I never considered it.
Austerit y. A wooden box makes a fine home. Walk through the mist to the drop toilet. Carry three tablespoons of peanut butter up 1,000 vertical meters to eat it at an empty wooden table, and it tastes like gold.
Community. That solo night at Powell: 31 empty bunks, a candle in a stranger's gin bottle, and an Intentions Book scrawled with months of my fellow trampers' weather reports. I never for a second felt alone.
Electric lights dim most of these, in their way. They ain't strictly natural. They look like any old Warehouse. We're still disconnected, I suppose, but they certainly shrink austerity in the name of 'comfort.'
But I submit that it's community where the lights hit us hardest. It shouldn't make a difference, right? Plenty of humans worship under shitty overhead lights. Jenny grew up Lutheran, a tradition that sees candles as papist frippery; my own Episcopalian stock adores the high-church cosplay of incense and fire. Whatever your aesthetics, it's still just folks worshipping in a designated room.
A recent New York Times piece tried to get to the bottom of Finland's allegedly world-leading happiness. The reporter's most convincing answer was that Finns spend a staggering amount of time sitting around naked together in spare wooden boxes. Saunas, like huts, are austere, collective shelters from the dark and cold. You've left your standard comforts and protections outside the door or down at the trailhead. You are weakened by the heat or the hike. You are vulnerable. Merely by walking in the door, you place your trust in the neighbour beside you, whether they're naked or muddy and wiped from a 10km slog.
In a candle-lit hut, then, our collective trust is heightened – it's pretty, it's dark, it's romantic. What is romance but opening yourself to the unknown? Turn on the lights, and the need for that trust ebbs away, along with the warmth of the trust itself. Electric lights in a hut are togs in a sauna. They eliminate the dark, mysterious corners of the self through which we disappear into the wider human spirit. To light a hut like a bus station is to foreclose this union, and instead remind us how desperately we try to separate ourselves: if you see something, say something.
Now, New Zealand's a pretty trusting place, as they go. Far more so than America these days, it pains me to say. But even here, there's plenty of this twitch waiting in our lonesome, crowded lives below. We have come to the hut to leave it all behind – all but each other. Turn out the lights. Let us worship together in the dark.
We ate some noodles, yawned over the cards, then hauled off to our bunks. I couldn't sleep. Past midnight, the wind came up. Just a song at first, then a great thumping train of westerlies rattling through the mountain night.
The mighty Powell Hut began to tremble.
No big deal. Just a loving handshake from the void. The hut wasn't going to tumble down the mountain with all of us inside. Not this time.
Come the grey morning, we wiped the benches down, packed our wet socks, and set out into the rain once more.
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