‘They’re life savers in bad weather’: Hunters and trampers fight for beloved backcountry hut

Hunters and trampers are crying foul over the Department of Conservation’s (DOC) disposal of a small backcountry hut in north Canterbury.

Evangeline Bivvy was restored by volunteers in 2019, but the two-bunk hut was removed by DOC from its location near Lake Sumner after being knocked off its foundations in 2023.

Users wanted it returned near its original site, but the department said it was a low-use and low priority hut it was working to formally dispose of.

Craig Benbow, a former chair of the Backcountry Trust, said it appeared DOC had already made up its mind and had given the hut to the Rod Donald Trust before consulting the public.

The department had now publicly notified the disposal with people able to give their feedback.

But emails released to Benbow under the Official Information Act showed the hut had already been picked up by the Rod Donald Trust in July last year to be used as a day shelter on Te Ara Pātaka track on Banks Peninsula.

Benbow said DOC had failed to follow process.

“It’s fair to say it’s a low-use facility, no doubt about it, but we’ve got dozens of them across Canterbury. They are low-use but they are highly valued,” he said.

“The community highly values these remote places and remote structures because they’re life savers in bad weather. So we have quite a contrary view to the bean counters at DOC.”

The department should have worked with the community to come up with a plan after the hut was swept off its foundation in a storm in 2023, Benbow said.

“All the work that needed to be done had already been done so there was no need for any further investment apart from getting it back into a proper site and you can argue that it had to be lifted up and moved - we don’t know that because we haven’t seen a full geotech assessment of its original site compared to an alternative,” he said.

“I think it would’ve been a much more pragmatic approach to have taken a bit of time and actually worked our way through some options there instead of panicking and removing it.”

The department flew the hut out of the area and stored it on a nearby farm.

Volunteers continued to work towards getting it reinstated near its original location, Benbow said.

However, the emails obtained under the Official Information Act show DOC instead worked to find a new owner and get it off its books.

“We want to support the department to get its work done, we understand that it’s under budgetary constraints … but one of their key roles is to work with communities and in this case I think they have failed miserably to work with a community and failed their obligations … and that’s really disappointing and that’s why we are upset about the whole process,” Benbow said.

If DOC had followed the correct disposal process and the decision was not what users wanted “then so be it”, Benbow said.

But the department had not followed correct process and had given the hut to the Rod Donald Trust without consulting the community.

“Clearly they haven’t followed the process and it’s unfortunate, I suspect the trust is an innocent party in all of this,” he said.

DOC refused to be interviewed but in written answers to questions, operations manager Kirsty Milne said its decision was not final.

“DOC’s position has remained that reinstating the bivvy at its original site was neither safe nor financially viable,” Milne said.

“Maintaining the existing visitor network to a safe standard exceeds the department’s available resources and needs to evolve so that it is fit-for-purpose. The bivvy has been assessed as low-use and a low priority, with ongoing costs. DOC considers that repurposing the bivvy as a day shelter offers a practical future use that preserves its heritage values. This has been supported by internal technical advice and aligns with available resources.”

She admitted there was a lack of consultation before this year.

“Until the public notification process, we acknowledge that we did not engage directly with all the parties who were most interested in the proposed future of the bivvy,” Milne said.

“The decision has not been finalised, as the decision-making process is not complete. All submissions or objections will be considered by the decision maker, prior to making a final decision.”

But Richard Janssen, one of the volunteers that restored the hut in 2019, said the decision was already predetermined.

“I’m very, very, very annoyed and I’m being polite there. I think what’s happened with it absolutely stinks. That little biv has got historic significance in that valley,” Janssen said.

“It’s a very special biv, structurally sound, and it wouldn’t have been too difficult to put into a new place and as a volunteer I have always felt like a partner with DOC with previous projects that I’ve been on but with this one just left out in the cold. Months after the biv had been taken and given away I was emailed to say this has already happened and DOC already knew that volunteers were already in place doing things like geotechnical reports where we had found a new potential site for it, so DOC was aware of this and went ahead and did there own thing without any form of consultation. So it stinks.

“I think they’re just trying to cover their backsides. If it wasn’t for Craig making the Official Information Act request and finding out just what decisions were made, I think the officers at DOC would’ve just happily carried on. I think their notice of disposal is very much a retroactive rear-guard kind of action.”

Benbow said the department had reached an understanding that some kind of shelter could be reinstated in the Evangeline Stream area as long as DOC did not have to pay for it or maintain it.

Other backcountry huts were also at risk, Benbow said.

“We lose enough huts through attrition … without actually removing them,” he said.

“We are struggling to keep our hut stock actually in place because of the cost of reinvesting and the unwillingness of the department to reinvest in certain places and the remote ones are the ones that are really at risk because it’s so easy for the department to just wash their hands of it and say ‘we don’t want that any more because we don’t have record of a whole pile of people using it’ - ‘we can’t make revenue out of it’.”

Consultation closes on 9 July.

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