Tramping the Canyon Creek Track as a Beginner with Debbie Cartwright

So many of my guests have been tramping for as long as they can remember, usually with their parents. And then there's Debbie, who went on her first overnight tramp at 47, on her own, with a brand new pack she'd never worn and a bivvy bag because she didn't think she liked tents.

Debbie is a mental health counsellor in Ōtepoti Dunedin, and when we recorded, she'd been tramping for three years (as of two weeks earlier). She works in the city full time and can't usually wait to get out at the weekend.

Part of what I want to do with this podcast is help people get outdoors, and for a lot of people the outdoors feels big and scary. Debbie captures all of that so so well. So we go through her first solo tramp up the Canyon Creek Track, step by step, then the two times she went back. Plus snow camping, her son's very rough first tramp, her number one tramping mantra, and the trips she still wants to finish.

In this episode

• How Debbie found tramping at 47
• Gear for a first overnight tramp
• Canyon Creek Track, her first solo tramp
• Going back to Canyon Creek
• Snow camping, route finding and tramping solo
• Advice for your first overnight tramp
• Unfinished tramps on Debbie's list

How Debbie found tramping at 47

Debbie's love of the outdoors has always been there. She spent more time outdoors than in, with the kind of friends who went up rivers with her and built huts. Summers were spent camping at Moeraki, with the kids going feral all day, sometimes not seen from morning till dusk.

She grew up in Ōamaru, studied in Palmerston North and lived in Christchurch for a while. Then she moved to Dunedin, having said she would never live there (a cold grey hole, she thought). She loves it. There are beaches galore and mountains, and you can be in a cafe or an art gallery in the morning and up a mountain in the evening.

Always going a bit further

Debbie thinks she was always heading in this direction. When her son was young, they'd road trip and backpack for their holidays, stopping to do tracks along the way, sometimes for a whole day. As he got older and moved away, her day trips kept getting longer, and she'd be finishing as it got dusky, wanting to go further and further.

For Debbie, it's all about curiosity:

"It's always been about seeing what's there climbing up stuff going around this corner"

Her son reckons "let's just see what's around the next corner" should almost go on her gravestone.

She'd also saved for her first trip overseas, having never managed to leave New Zealand. It was all sorted, and she was due to go two weeks before the COVID lockdown, so she lost the trip. Coming out of lockdown, she decided it was time to buy all the gear.

Gear for a first overnight tramp

Debbie had never had the money for proper gear. Then she got lucky: Lowe Alpine followed her photography on Instagram, and a year of brand work for them got her some free Rab and Lowe Alpine gear. In a short space of time, she had everything she needed.

Good gear is about safety, and confidence too. Debbie always thought you couldn't really tramp safely on your own, she didn't have many outdoorsy friends at that point, and she wondered whether she knew her stuff.

She also never wanted to start on busy tracks. Most people might cut their teeth on something popular, and that wasn't where she wanted to be.

Her first kit

Her first kit was, in her words, all a bit of a mess:

• A pack from Macpac, bought new. Her first time ever wearing it was on the track.
• Hiking poles and a burner from an outdoor store. She didn't know how to use the burner and was scared of it, so she practised at home in the kitchen first.
• A bivvy bag, because she didn't think she liked tents.
• An old sleeping bag.
• No PLB. She didn't know what a PLB was.

Canyon Creek Track, her first solo tramp

Years earlier, on a walk in the Ahuriri, Debbie had fallen in love with the valley. She looked up at an imposing little canyon and a sign that said Canyon Creek, and asked if they could go there. The answer was no, they had to stay on the flat. It never left her mind.

A mountaineer friend had raved about it too, with photos of camping up there in the snow. So for her first tramp, Canyon Creek was where she wanted to go.

Hitching to the start, twice

Her car couldn't make it to the end of the Ahuriri Valley road, so she parked up and hitched a ride to the car park with a couple she knew from Dunedin. As they walked off, she realised she'd left her hiking poles in her car.

She needed them, so she hitched back with a fisherman, got the poles, then hitched in again squashed in the back of a car with four young men from Queenstown. They were dragging their mates up Canyon Creek too, and they'd given the least experienced one a big board game to carry. It was easily an hour of mucking around: a disaster before she'd even left.

Rivers, scree and a fear of heights

On that first tramp, she didn't really know how to cross a river and was trying not to get her feet wet. Then came a hill that would feel like a little hill to her now. With the pack on, she felt like it might make her wobble and fall, and the whole thing felt so alien.

At the top of the canyon she was blissed out by how beautiful it was. She still had a fear of heights then (she couldn't even look over a veranda without feeling nauseous), and she kept walking, looking for somewhere to camp. She crossed the big scree fields, her first time on scree, which she found fascinating, then started up towards the upper valley.

It was windy and gusty, and the pack was still wearing her. She was holding on to the rocks, scared, and embarrassed, because there were probably tents on the other side of the river. She'd read that someone had died up there after a fall, and that got into her head. It was getting late too, because getting her poles had taken so long. So she retreated back over the scree to the bush edge.

A night in the bivvy bag

She made dinner at the bush edge, but the wind was so strong she worried she'd blow away in her bivvy bag. So she went back to a big rock she'd seen, found a couple of other people camping near it, had a yarn and bivvied a bit further away, feeling more secure with people around.

In the morning, a few people came down from the upper valley looking wretched after no sleep at all: it can get really windy up there.

Then there was the creek where she tried to get under a tree and her pack got stuck. She was there for ages working it out (these days she'd unhook it and pull it round). It was still fun, and so beautiful.

That first tramp was a long time coming. Debbie tries not to see the years before, when she wanted to go but was too scared or too worried, as wasted.

Going back to Canyon Creek

The second time

By the next trip, Debbie had done a bunch of other tramping, and she was determined to make it up to the upper valley. That first hill, the one that had scared her, felt really easy, and she wondered why it had ever been scary. The rocky climb up to the upper valley still felt hard and a bit scary (she was still a bit scared of heights), but she knew she could do it. It was just as beautiful up there as she'd imagined.

The third time

The next time, she couldn't even find the parts where she'd been scared. She went higher and higher and camped up there by herself, blissed out by being so high.

One of the nice things about this tramp is that you can see how far you've come, almost all the way back out to the river. That time did get a bit scary: she was following some intel on the route, the river must have changed a bit, and she ended up on very loose scree above a waterfall, which she didn't like.

Snow camping, route finding and tramping solo

Debbie built her confidence by getting out in all sorts of conditions. By her second trip back, she'd camped in the snow up on the Hawkdun Range with a friend. Now she goes snow camping a couple of times a year, and on her last three tramps it has snowed overnight while she's been in her tent. She's done some route finding, tramped all over the South Island, and by then had a tent she loved.

She feels more herself out there, working out where she's going and what she needs, and the more time you spend out there, the more you know when it's going to snow.

Solo or with company

Debbie has only done a couple of tramps with other people, plus the O and W circuits in Patagonia with a group. She prefers tramping solo, and she also enjoys tramping with her son. He's very like-minded and loves backcountry stuff.

Her son's first tramp

The first time she took her son tramping, she nearly killed him (he's going to kill her for telling this one). She'd kitted him out with a pack and all his gear, and they headed for the tops near Lewis Pass, a climb straight up through the bush, between Christmas and New Year.

They were told there was plenty of water at a tank by the bush edge, so they didn't carry much, and the heat was brutal. It was his first time wearing a pack, and his fitness was running and squash fitness. Debbie was in charge of the food, and what she eats and what he eats turned out to be very different.

At the bush edge, the water tank had a crack in it and there was no water. So Debbie went all the way up to the tarns by herself to fetch water. The next morning was lovely, and he felt fine to do the loop, until he crashed again. These days he's a hard-out tramper who'll go for days.

Advice for your first overnight tramp

Debbie's advice for a first overnight is not to overthink it. Make sure you have the gear you need and know where you're going. Then her number one tramping mantra: be prepared to change your plans. If you don't make it far enough, you need to be able to stop, eat and sleep somewhere else, and so many of her favourite tramps have been places she didn't expect to end up because she had to change plans.

I find that a mental game. If I've got a plan, I like to stick to it, and when I'm going slower than I thought, it's as much mental as physical.

For Debbie, it comes down to expectations and what you're out there for. As she sees it, people go out there for the experience. And how you feel going in changes everything:

"we're human beings. If we've had a stressful week at work and we're a bit run down, our ten k is going to feel like 15"

On the other hand, if you've been busting to get out there and full of energy for days, 20 kilometres is going to feel like 10.

Keep the challenges coming

Debbie's other tip is to keep progressing, so you don't get sick of doing the same thing. She'd never spent any time in the snow in her whole life, so she did a couple of days on an alpine club introduction in the Remarkables, her first time in snow and her first time in crampons. At that point she didn't realise she wasn't going to become a hard-out mountaineer, and she reckons she's missed that boat now. Still, each little skill you add takes you a bit further on every new tramp, and spending time on a glacier is another one.

Getting comfortable with winter tramping counts too, frosts included. Debbie loves waking up with everything frozen.

The winter we recorded, I did a sunrise hike to Tama Lakes in the North Island, walking under a full moon with frost sparkling on everything. We didn't even need our head torches.

Unfinished tramps on Debbie's list

Debbie's bucket list is mostly the tramps she wants another go at.

• A hut with her son. They'd read it was a nice six hour tramp in. After nine hours they gave up, because she could no longer pull herself up the rocks, and they had to retreat.
• Brodrick Pass and down into the Landsborough. Last time, she did all the river crossings on the Huxley in her Tevas and dropped a big rock on her ankle. Then it rained. She reached Brodrick Hut absolutely drenched, couldn't light the fire, and her ankle swelled up like a watermelon, so she limped out sheepishly the next day.

I love that Debbie goes back to give these places another shot. I tend to hold a grudge, like with the Pinnacles: we went for sunrise after I'd pulled an all-nighter, it felt endless, and we got no views at the top. When we recorded, we were going back within weeks to give it its chance for redemption.

Five years ago, Debbie wouldn't have believed she'd be on a tramping podcast. Her message:

"if I can do it … anyone can do it. … All you actually have to have is a desire to do it and a bit of fitness"

Places from this episode

• Canyon Creek Track
• Ahuriri Valley
• Ōtepoti Dunedin
• Ōamaru
• Moeraki
• Palmerston North
• Christchurch
• Queenstown
• Hawkdun Range
• Lewis Pass
• The Remarkables
• Tama Lakes
• Brodrick Pass
• Brodrick Hut
• Huxley River
• Landsborough
• The Pinnacles

Follow Debbie

Debbie shares her adventures on Instagram, including her trips to Chile and Bolivia, and says she's easy to find under her name.

More like this

• Starting Tramping in her 40s and Lake Waikaremoana as a Family with Lois Baldwin
• From First Tramp to Paparoa and all the Great Walks with Nicola Harvie
• Solo Tramping the Mangamate Loop in Whirinaki Forest Park with Sharon Evans
• Off-Track Tramping to the Unknown in Rockburn Valley with Sarah Morrison

Until then, keep adventuring :)