My time as a National Park Ranger in Arthur's Pass National Park by Tony Perrett

My Time As A National Park Ranger at Arthur’s Pass National Park – Tony Perrett

I was a ranger at Arthur’s Pass from July 1970 until August 1975.

• The decade of the 1970s was the time of major hut building in the Park. First there was Casey Hut in the Poulter, followed by Hawdon, the Carrington replacement, and Goat Pass in the Mingha/Deception, followed by the Lockwood Shelter at Temple Basin. These were built using Lockwood technology. Another big building project was the new workshop/store at Rough Creek, which was a conventional build. I worked on all of these projects, plus helped build a new bridge over the Upper Taramakau River. Several of these projects were memorable for different reasons.
• The Carrington Hut was a tragedy. Stan Scott, a fellow ranger and the helicopter pilot died when the machine hit the Clough Cableway. The loss of Stan in particular hit the small Arthur’s Pass community and his family very hard. Rob Young, a Park Board casual and I had to do the body recoveries the next day. An experience that left me with lasting nightmares for a long time. No trauma counselling in those days, you sucked it up and went to the pub.
• I was given the job of getting 40 cubic metres of premix gravel from the top of the goods lift at Temple Basin to the building site of the Lockwood Shelter. This involved building an ingenious wooden ramp and wheelbarrows and it took weeks. My cousin Julian Bennett assisted me for a while.
• I had the job of clearing the site of the new Rough Creek Workshop/store. The site was covered in quite dense scrub. The technique used was pulling bushes out of the ground using a snig chain attached to the TEA Ferguson tractor. I came close to flipping the tractor several times as the front reared up. No safety frame on the tractor in those days.
• The building of the bridge over the Upper Taramakau went smoothly enough. We were staying at Locke Stream hut. Towards the end of the job, we were advised that heavy rain was forecast, so we decided to move down valley to Kiwi hut to shorten our trip out of the Valley. We had our personal gear plus we were carrying bridge building tools, including an Atlas Copco rock drill, a heavy piece of gear. Because we were so laden and were expecting to be able to get back to Aickens the next day, we left most of our remaining food at Locke Stream hut. It wasn’t to be. Several days stuck at Kiwi hut ensued where we ran out of both food and tobacco. We eventually risked a deep crossing of the Taramakau. I was the smallest of the team so was in the middle. I swear my feet didn’t touch the riverbed much. A hot pie and a jug of beer at the Otira pub awaited us.
• A lot of time was spent, especially in summer, maintaining and servicing recreational facilities in the park, many along SH73.
• We were first responders for road accidents and for Search and Rescue. The latter was always a task after Easter, especially if it had rained hard over the long weekend and tramping parties were held up somewhere. If parties were late or were in difficulties, we would try and help them to safety. Sometimes we assisted the Police in searches and body recoveries, which was not very pleasant and usually ended up with a trip to the pub afterwards to shut out the memories.
• We would do quite a bit of weed spraying in spring, be it broom at Bealey which we sprayed using 245 T, with a red dye. Bealey in spring was a sunny spot so we would strip to the waist get some rays and go home covered in red dye and poison. This spray was banned later. We also sprayed Russell Lupins in the riverbeds, with little success, and briar on the Klondyke Flats.
• Firefighting occurred in summer and we often were called out to assist. We had a small fire trailer with a Wajax pump, hoses and other tools. Fires often seemed to start along the railway line for some reason. I recall one fire at the Greyney Bluffs where a truckload of hay burst into fire from spontaneous combustion which spread up the hillside.
• A ranger was stationed at the Lockwood Shelter over the ski season to assist the Ski Patrol with rendering First Aid and stretchering injured skiers off the mountain. Sometimes you could end up doing this several times a day which was a pain.
• We took it in turns to spend seven days on duty in the Park HQ and Visitor Centre. Apart from general office duties, you had to give slide talks or guided walks to school groups that had booked in. One of the highlights personally was to take the kids from the Christchurch School for the Deaf on a guided walk.
• The Park would run a two week holiday programme over the Xmas/New Year period involving, slide talks at night, and guided walks in the park during the daytime, always well patronised. Some other duties were unusual or one offs. Some examples that I undertook were trapping and shooting of wild cats at the Halpins dump. I also trapped stoats as part of a study being run by DSIR Ecology Division, storing them in our home freezer until I had enough to send off in an insulated box to their office in Lower Hutt.
• One of the funniest experiences happened one wet Monday morning when I was Duty Ranger. A very bedraggled looking guy came running in saying he had lost all his pigs! He was on his way to Canterbury and as he drove uphill from White Bridge, the lock on the back door of his crate on his truck failed and all of his baconer-size pigs fell out and bolted into the bush. I rounded up a couple of other staff and we spent a challenging couple of hours catching these pigs. The owner was ever so grateful. It wasn’t an easy thing to do to catch these porkers and a shower was required at the end of it.
• I often ended up accompanying various scientists studying the botany or entomology of the park. I once assisted researchers from the University of Hawaii using a series of seismographs across the middle of the South Island. Our machine was located on the Jeep Track to the skifield right on the Alpine Fault. There could be up 300 small tremors recorded over a three day period with a few bigger shakes. I had to use a short wave radio to pick up the pips of the atomic clock in Hawaii to accurately set the recorder. Sometimes a challenge to get a signal.
• Perhaps one of the most interesting jobs was to essentially babysit a couple of characters that turned up one summer. The first was an acquaintance of the Chief Ranger, Peter Croft. This individual was intent on making a film about the park. He was an elderly Philadelphia Irishman who couldn’t walk more than a few yards. He was also an alcoholic. I was frequently sent over to the Otira pub to recharge his flagon with medium sweet sherry. The filmmaking was limited to me being sent into the park with his very expensive SLR camera with instructions on what to photograph. The other character turned out to be transvestite entomologist who stayed up most nights catching moths with his UV light. During the day, he could sometimes be encountered walking around the village in his vinyl gear and heels. They shared a small cottage on Sunshine Terrace and there were frequent rows between them that I was expected to arbitrate and keep the peace. The situation resolved itself when the filmmaker ended up in hospital, never to be seen again?
• On the entomological theme, I did an altitudinal survey collecting flying insects especially mayflies, for entomologists at Canterbury Museum and University of Canterbury Zoology Department using a device called a malaise trap with rock cyanide in the trap.
• We were sometimes asked by the police to help them out. The most unusual was a request to perform a citizens’ arrest of someone who was being pursued. This individual concerned was a disturbed Vietnam War veteran who had absconded from a Psychiatric hospital in Christchurch, and had commandeered a vehicle that was headed our way, intent on climbing Mt Rolleston in jandals and T shirt. He had forced a police car off the road at Porters Pass. We decided to set up a road block on the one way Rough Creek bridge. We had a spotter in place who would give us a signal when the individual came off the hill from Snow Creek. This was relayed to me sitting at the village end of the bridge. I then drove our oldest Landover onto the bridge and bailed out. I unfortunately had left the keys in the ignition in my haste to get out of the way. The guy leapt out of his vehicle and got into the Landover and we immediately tried to distract him and recover the keys. He was eventually restrained by us until the police turned up shortly after. The story had a happy ending, a few months later a guy turned up at park HQ , introduced himself and apologised for troubling us and thanking us for stopping him from further harm, so happy ending !!
• So all in all, my time at Arthur’s Pass gave me a good grounding on aspects of National Park
  management, people management and some unforgettable one-off experiences, which stood me in good stead for the rest of my career.