Jan Finlayson - Public Access, Stewardship Land, and Grasshoppers

Jan Finlayson has spent a lifetime exploring and advocating for New Zealand’s wild places. In this conversation she reflects on childhood memories of camping and school tramps, early adventures on the Routeburn, and the lessons learned from near misses in the mountains and rivers. We talk about her strong views on hut booking systems and access rights, and why legal roads and stewardship land matter for the future of conservation. Jan’s stories move between humour, challenge, and deep care for the backcountry — and remind us what’s at stake in protecting the places we tramp.

Transcript

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Jan 0:00

going up separation stream at about three in the morning. So it's completely dark, and we had climbing a bit around the rock. And my friend took a hold. It was fine. And then I took the same hold and it fell off, and so I peeled off back into the water. I went down a lot of drops with my pack on and just totally soaked,

Jonty 0:25

kiro and welcome to the Tramping Life, a podcast about hiking in outro New Zealand, or as we call it here, tramping. I'm jt, and in each episode I chat with people who share passion for exploring this incredible country. We'll hear about the tracks they love, the huts they return to, the lessons they've learned, and what keeps them heading back into the bush. My guest today is Jan Finlayson, former president of Federated Mountain Clubs. Jan is a lifelong T tramper with a deep passion for New Zealand's backcountry and wild places. She's been a strong advocate for conservation, public access, and protecting the landscapes that define our outdoor experiences. I'm delighted to welcome her to the podcast, Kira.

Jan 1:04

Thank you, jti.

Speaker 1:05

I would like to start, by understanding what your first memories are of being outdoors.

Jan 1:11

I grew up in Christchurch but look back then, I think being outdoors was just normal and so we did things like, going to Ashley Gorge, Burling's flat up in the Port Hills my stepfather was, a big wig in scouting, so there was a lot of that stuff. We had school camps and Sunday school camps, and they always went to places where you'd do a bit of tramping, although I'm not sure we called it tramping then. I think we just called it going up for a walk or something like that. Why NOI camp? It was one place we went quite often. That's in Aui in AA Harbor and it's a place where, longtime FMC supported John Simpson was running,, plenty of hills around there. It was always good. I remember being, on Quail Island camping when the a is disaster happened. not too much tramping there, but rock hopping and finding out about plants and animals So that was just a very normal experience, I think, for kids at the time.

Speaker 2:06

So do you remember your first multi-day tramp?

Jan 2:09

One was when I was, in fourth form, year 10. And we would go to Mount Thomas and we would have, one or two nights in a reasonably lavish kind of place that, there was maybe some cold running water and then we would do what was called an out camp. And so we would have to, tramp through some stuff and we camped under a, Piece of plastic or something like that on seriously uneven ground. That was a really good experience, because we were given our head with that. And I remember getting lost actually for quite a bit. and so that stuff that I think kids learned back then from a very early age about how to get themselves out of a pickle came into play. To see the worry on the faces of the others as well, was a lesson at that time. Yeah, good, salient stuff for a young person. Another one, was probably year or two or three earlier than that was when I went on the root burn for the first time. And so all of the great walks as we know them, were capital letters. they weren't that then. they were pretty goaty and muddy and pretty minimally regulated, arguably far greater, but the root burn, anyway we had everything there. And I think that's partly what makes a great tramp is a bit of everything, the juxtapositions and the feeling alive and it's wild and figure out whether you're capable or not. But on that trip it was all pretty swimming until we got up to Harris Saddle. The weather went seriously to pack then. It was my first decent experience on tops and horrible weather. it was good. We made it and we saw people who weren't having a lot of fun and were falling over and getting upset. Mackenzie hut, though, this was the thing. it was raining so hard you couldn't see the lake from the hut, and it was packed. So every bed had two people. and there were people elsewhere all over the place. Under on, over, north west socks, the miles, all of that stuff. But, it was, a really good social learning thing, I think, for everybody, not just for a kid. Just making way for other people, doing the right thing by other people. Safe in the knowledge that it was, really a just fleeting discomfort. Yeah, that was a good trip. it taught me a lot. I think everybody took a lot from that the rough edges of that experience. I think what made it particularly good and they've been knocked off. So you can't experience that and that kind of place anymore. And any kind of place you can experience that docs probably gonna be coming at you with the booking system. I think that is a shame.

Speaker 4:24

It does solve the overcrowding issue to a degree and I. There's mixed views obviously on booking systems. I think one benefit though is they get the money, like they don't have to rely on hut tickets, that it's guaranteed income for the huts. So at least they get that contribution. But there are obviously a number of downsides. I guess during your time at FMC, what was the position on the Hut booking system?

Jan 4:44

Oh, every time. I went on the booking system. It felt like a blow. Occasionally you could see the rationale for it. Most of the time no. And there wasn't the data gathering to support it. Yeah it's a bit of a shame because every time you do that, you make the back country just slightly more like. City Space Motel, booking, trivago, booking.com, it's the entitlement and I think people's inclination to push others out and not behave as they should in the back country. But so that's a social thing, but also I think back country travel and the way that huts have been set up, certainly in the past, and I think we're probably intended to carry on that should support. Travel on a whim and in accord with a good weather forecast and for people to change their minds, change their plans as things go. And it stops that it really puts a damper on it. And I think it's a loss. It's far greater loss than it is a gain. I do understand, as I've got four children. They've been little and I've wanted to take them to book places. But to be honest, I would've been happy if we got there and they had to sleep on the floor because, they would've done it fine and it would've been a good thing for them. I would love to see a more conservative approach taken to the booking system and to even have some removed from it, but very much hand in hand. I tend to think with other back to basics oriented measures, like allowing some track standards to slip. Because otherwise you might as well be in the botanic gardens. walking down the footpath outside your place if you don't have rocks and tussocks and tree roots and all of those things to navigate and to work out the slipperiness of the different kinds of mud, all of that stuff. if you can't do that, you don't feel so alive. It's not the challenge, and it doesn't bring the reward. And with it, probably greater provision of campsites because that's good. You feel capable when you're carrying a tent and you've got campsite and it's got a toilet, maybe a kitchen shelter. I think that's enough for so many people and it's cheap and easy.

Speaker 6:40

It's true. obviously there are campsites, but so much of, tramping culture is relating to the huts. As opposed to camping, it's quite a different kind of mentality.

Jan 6:48

Yeah. And we, it depends probably more front country campsites I think would be, a way to go. The sort of thing where families can just go away for a weekend and it's very cheap and kids love it. The abled Tasman as well. back then it wasn't situated high on a bench track. You just came out onto beaches, walked along the beaches, and then back into the bush. very little harm done because so few people did it. It was just beautiful. I'd never seen a place quite like that and to think, it was ours. We all, as New Zealanders owned it equally. it was lovely. We stayed at Torrent Bay Hut and, going out to the very outside of the outlet as the tide was coming in and just with my sister repeatedly throwing ourselves in, and being rushed into the inlet and then racing back around to do it again. Fantastic.

Speaker 7:35

Do you have any favorite huts?

Jan 7:37

I don't get too far away and like to have a light footprint, but partly because I'm blessed with a fantastic back country. Within two hours I can be quite a long way out the RHI Gorge Road. Or Donna Raki. So there's a lot to do in my back country, but some of the really special stuff I think would be the Musters huts in our back country. Most particularly Haku Terry, but through the rest of that country as well. I think when Haku Terry was purchased by the Nature Heritage Fund and put into the public conservation estate. they put little plaques up beside the doors with the names of, people involved in recent musters. I know a lot of those people and I know their families and it just feels owned and local and it's lovely. So those huts and because they haven't been mucked around with, maintenance. So that's all. And they smell right. They've got the, all the cooking smells and all the fires and so on. It's that layer upon layer of, human occupation for whatever reason. It's built up, I think, in the scent and the boards,

Speaker 8:34

You've been returning to a number of places, throughout your life. Have you seen those change in terms of the wildlife? Are our predator free actions working?

Jan 8:44

Things come and go. We like to be simplistic about it, but it never is and often tracking the etiology of a pest. incursion is pretty hard. They're as complicated as humans are hedgehogs. I've got a particular place in my heart. It's a particularly dark place in my heart, I should say. I was on the Canterbury Hierarchy Conservation Board, and I think it was my first summer on the board. The Tasman Riverbed trapping project began. at the end of the season, they sent us a tally. They had, 1, 2, 3, 400 of this, that, and the other thing, what you would've expected, and there were 3000 hedgehogs. who knew they were there undercover. They came out at night and they ate all of those things that can't move around, the eggs, chicks, sitting, parents trying to protect their nests, the lizards and the invertebrates. They're coldblooded and can't go anywhere. Yeah. 3000 and, of course they've continued that project. and the tellies, the proportions have remained the same.

Speaker 9:41

I remember, I think it was Auckland Museum that had an exhibit of introduced animals to New Zealand and it had a little placard with the rationale why the Brits brought 'em along. And it talked about, deer for game and same with rabbits. And then it had a hedgehog and apparently they were introduced for sentimental reasons.

Jan 9:58

Mr. Tiggy Winkle.

Speaker 9:59

exactly. So other than the Harris Saddle, have you had any other near misses?

Jan 10:04

There are quite a few. I do remember, climbing Mount Insula and stopping there to camp the night on Right. coal. And it was the cold. I'm really poor with cold anyway, I had to stay in a tent and it was on snow as you'd expect. Which is fine. I expected things would be fine, but what I hadn't realized when I woke up in the morning, my mat had popped. So I just essentially lying on the snow. That was very bad. I'd always been a swimmer, but I had a summer where I had three near miss but with water. So the URA River crossing after Gillespie had to be hauled out of that. And it's just a big river at that time of year spring. A couple of worse ones though, that same summer. One was an attempt on darshak, which didn't actually work out in the end, but going up separation stream at about three in the morning. So it's completely dark, and we had climbing a bit around the rock. And my friend took a hold. It was fine. And then I took the same hold and it fell off, and so I peeled off back into the water. I went down a lot of drops with my pack on and just totally soaked, before I managed to haul myself out. That wasn't nice. I just, I had no idea where I was. Another one, oddly enough was Ari Gorge, which is very close to where I live. It's this beautiful little lowland braided river. It meanders around and everybody here loves it. But that's probably the closest I've come to grief and water ever. I just got stuck and couldn't get out of a great big, deep hole. So it's those three collectively over that season did make me far more cautious around water, and I've barely touched it again since. Other marvelous trips would be a great trip up Mount Catherine in the Hakuta on the winter solstice. It's a great big party of friends and friends of friends. I don't know the word. Four car loads of people It was utterly freezing. It was, the solstice place was covered in snow. It's a bit over 2000 meters. And everything was frozen. Just, a water bottle was just. Hopeless. And everything else, the sandwiches turned solid but the conversations were fantastic. a couple of other great whole day trips that I've done geraldine cascaded saddle and back in a day and Geraldine root burn and back in a day it was great, staying awake that whole time, just doing the drive, starting about midnight and getting there and starting walking. Cascade was just an in and out a thing. The root burn, went up Emily Stream Creek, whatever it is. Went up a peak, the top of the mountains and then traversed across. I had meant to go up Emily, but I misjudged the traverse, also missed the start of the track at the top of Lake Mackenzie and ended up pack, floating down. It was just a beautiful day at the start of February pack floating. Just didn't matter. It was wonderful. And got down to the hut and it's like club me, people in bikinis. Wonderful stuff. And after I dried out a bit, walked back to the car and I got the tops walk and the warm evening light and had the place utterly to myself. Which is pretty rare, I think, and that part of our touristy world, I think doing those things as a single day, that was, yeah, it was great.

13:06

Do you have any favorite places to swim?

Jan 13:08

I would say anywhere is a good place to swim It's just gotta be right time, right people, right moment, I think probably the most welcome swim I've had would've been after a trip going over bras and saddle just behind where I live. So this is up the Ranu, Tata. So we went up black Birch Stream and then piled out of the stream and just had hours and hours on screen. We ran outta water. We were going up. Moving scree for hours. Got to the top. Were pretty happy. Until we saw that it was pink, immobile, scree to come down on, we just didn't need that. So jumping into Bush Stream at the end of that was just like bomb. It was fantastic, but on any other day it might not have been so sweet.

Speaker 13:45

There's all the variables to go into having the perfect swimming opportunity You've been longer champion for access to places. Was there a particular moment that inspired you to get involved or is that an awareness that built over time?

Jan 13:58

Oh, it's an awareness, futile times you couldn't go anywhere. You know you were trapped within the lads area. Tribal worse, the advent of roads. You know that common law principle is for the passage of the public. No matter who you are, you just need that. And roads are the gold standard. Other forms of access are also marvelous, whether it's marginal strips or whatever it is. But, yeah, legal roads are vitally important. I think we really forget what our democracy has given us. We would not have a good life without those principles. I've, worked on access issues a lot with respect to tenure review, which has been a massive shift in land governance. Over the last 30 years, under the codified form of land tenure review. And it just ensuring that the public can get to the beautiful places which lie beyond, timing is everything. Sometimes a bit of patience is needed on these things. The Hunter Valley access remains an interesting one. so that's that Crown Pastoral lease near the head of Lake Hawe. It's really the only enormous alpine valley of its elk that doesn't have strong public access. But as I said, timing is everything on that. The public need to feel that if they take part in a public process, then their contribution will have and, Any agreement reached will mean something. We also don't wanna undermine, the importance of our network of roads and including unformed legal roads. As soon as, a council agrees to stop a road here, it only encourages the neighbor and people in neighboring areas to think that it might be an easy thing to do. You get officials accustomed to stopping roads and the public accustomed to having officials stop roads and you don't want that kind of contagion to take on. We don't know what things are going to look like in the future. We've gotta keep them.

Speaker 15:47

So over time, we're winning more battles and getting more access. Or you think access is slowly being restricted over time.

Jan 15:53

Oh, it's shifting. I don't think you can generalize so much on that. There's a far greater public awareness now about, and I'm talking specifically about roads here. But of course, easements and esplanade strips, marginal strips are part of the picture. With respect to roads, we've got the Whams, the Walking Access Mapping site. It took a while for the presence of that. Tool to become apparent to the public, but I think it is far better understood now. When I was the FMC President, we started a mini campaign called Same as Highway one, whose point was to let the public know you've got about 56,000 kilometers of unformed legal roads and they're all yours to use. I'll take your amazing places and show them where to find them to go on the Whams site and have a look at where they are. So Awareness is growing, but of course there is always pressure on them. You get. Owners of the land adjacent, remembering that the landowners don't own the land underlying a legal road. They just own the land to either side. They might find that they've got stuff happening at their properties that didn't used to happen and they don't like it. Whether it's human waste issues or leaving gates open you get a new landowner who just doesn't like the thought of the public being anywhere near. Those isolated cases pop up all over the place. They can be infectious and I think they need to be stamped out pretty quickly.

Speaker 17:09

What's your take on stewardship land and how that is best progressed.

Jan 17:13

It's such a complicated topic. That campaign, that, FMC, it is running, it started out with a different name. It was called Forgotten Lands. And that was really because it had been forgotten about by dog. It's reclassification had been forgotten about. I think, or deprioritized might actually be a better way to characterize it. Anyway, it hadn't been done and I think that folk had wanted to use the land for other things. I'd always seen it as a bit of an easy target. there's this trope that it's low value. It's just not, and it may have been true that there might have been, your gravel pits and your holding paddocks and those kinds of things, and they were brought into the docker state when there was no better home for them. I think in 1987. They're largely gone rationalized through the swap provisions in the legislation. If you were to go on the Wams website now and look at any of those patches of green, that are conservation area, that's what a stewardship, patch is how they term it. if you've got conservation area, it means steward. You'll find it's high value. You'll find your gravel pits are very rare these days. So you are, looking at, little s-shaped bits, so they're river margins. you are looking at the white ha on the coast, the coast is enormous. you are looking at Harari. So Harari Station bought by the Nature Heritage Fund. Its, stewardship, the Remarkables. Conservation area, almost entirely very high value land. I should say, tenure review, which has bought, I think it's 449,000 hectares into the public conservation estate. that's been through a very rigorous process, pinpointed where the high values are, I think it's something like 49% of that country is in stewardship. And it is been purchased for the public, for conservation and recreation purposes on the strength of its high values. So it's not low value country at all. If you were to give Conservation Park status, for example, to, any of that country actually that we've proposed for the Wild Rivers Park on the West coast down there, I think it would be a step backwards. It will be a loss. That stuff deserves National Park status. It's magnificent country and mostly in very high health, and it deserves a highly protective status. If you give conservation park status, it'll be open to, mining hydro schemes, other kinds of exploitation, So if you've got conservation parks sitting alongside land, very similar quality, both with much higher status, like National Park or whatever, then they get different treatment and they deserve the same treatment. And there are more issues too. But, so I do think we need to go about reclassification very carefully.

Speaker 19:48

And how aligned do you think the conservation interests are with those of Iwi? Because I believe that has been a challenge in the past.

Jan 19:54

Oh, that's another group and everybody really, needs to be able to spot a wolf in whatever clothing it's wearing. So if you have an iwi group coming along saying, we want to mine dam cut down trees, whatever it is, we should be prepared to call that out for what it is. Even if the kaki label is slapped on it, we've gotta call it for what it is. That's our job. Push back against it, poor old nature is the loser. I think in this world we're in affected. It always has been. Humans are just top dog right now. And I think nature's always going to come off second best in our hands. But the, there do need to be those of us who know and have the bottle and the mandate to say things, how they are.

Speaker 20:35

If you had any particularly memorable wildlife encounters.

Jan 20:38

I was thinking about this because so often I think we, we think about amazing encounters as the ones with rare critters or spectacular ones or whatever. But honestly, I went up our local hill the other day. it's one I've been to most little Mount Peel. It's actually, they call it a good, honest climb. It's nearly a thousand meters. Pretty much all up. But it's very close to home and it's well loved by locals. you always meet people, up there, but grasshopper season has started and they're just so guileless and they just fly off and they land wherever they land and they just don't seem to care. and they were in my hair and down the top I love them. I was on a trip down at Stewart Island a few years ago, and this was back in the day when school kids could still very freely. Go and do the tramping. And it was all fine. And there weren't sheets and sheets of health and safety things and lots of orange plastic. So this great trip with year 10 kids, my son was one of them. We went down to the island got off at Fred's camp tramped over to, freshwater. Then over to Mason Bay where we stayed for a few days. And then back to freshwater and out fire, north Arm and Port William over at Mason Bay where we were camped. We went for a Womble one day and there's this perched lake, and everything around it is dead. I guess there's quite a lot of saline incursion in there. And there are these shag chicks sitting in great big style nests in there. they were stunning things, just watching us as we trached through their patch. Oh, beautiful. Another thing I really like doing is especially just down our way at, up in the tusser gland there in my backyard, you just sit down for a bit. And go quiet and it all comes back and mingles around you. And it really puts things in perspective because they don't care. They don't care about you. They've got their own lives. And it doesn't matter how tiny those bugs are, I think, they just, they teach you a lesson. Don't get too big for your boots. You're not that special.

Speaker 22:29

Do you have a bucket list of trips or places that you still want to go and see?

Jan 22:33

The TRO It's a fantastic concept and hits off to Jeff Chaplin and everybody around him at that time that koup, which I think was there to start with, keep it reasonably gnarly. Keep self selecting. The gnarly people do it. I see it when I got to Harter on one of those days, mid-summer where there's just a stream of people on the TA and I think, can this place cope? I'm not sure. I think, we can certainly keep the numbers down to a reasonable number by only installing at the, at the most extra toilets, kitchen shelters, maybe campsites, no more extension to huts. I live in Geraldine people come down here to avoid crossing, the Ranata River. they come out to Geraldine Resupply, stay at the camp. I often pick them up. Hitching I like how they are when they get here. They are very fit. They've got good perspective. They've chucked all the rubbish outta their backpacks, and they're just going on the stuff they know they need. They're nowhere near finishes grieving period, so they're still quite happy. I find them all very interesting folk. I just think that. It's a great thing for Kiwis to do to see their country from top to bottom and all its shades. It's probably the only genuine bucket list thing I think everything else would be great. Just see if we can get there.

Speaker 23:52

Thank you so much for listening to the Tramping life. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please follow the podcast in whatever app you use. Tell a friend about it and consider leaving a rating or a review. It really helps more people discover the show. you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you. Drop me an email at the tramping life, one word@gmail.com.