If you’ve ever made the impressive mission across Ball Pass or dreamed of watching the sun set framed by mountains and sea from Chancellor Hut, you’ll know these are the kinds of places that stay with you forever. Big, raw, proper New Zealand.
But what happens when the terrain itself starts to change, not just season to season, but for good?
Someone who has been looking into exactly just that is Shane Orchard. Author of the Backcountry Ski-Touring in New Zealand guide that’s probably sitting on your bookshelf right now (or at least on someone in your crew’s bookshelf), Shane is also a hydro-ecologist and conservation scientist who’s spent years watching the Southern Alps shift firsthand.
Some of you may have met him at our Downstream film night in Ōtautahi where he shared his experience of how the changes happening up high in our mountains ripple all the way down to our river systems, lakes and coastline.
About The Study
Shane, together with Aubrey Miller and Pascal Sirguey, has just published a new study that maps exactly how erosion and glacier retreat are changing the way we can access some of our most iconic national park terrain.
The research (published open-access here) focuses on Aoraki Mount Cook and Westland Tai Poutini national parks. Using high-resolution digital elevation models and satellite imagery, the study tracks the evolution of historical public access routes (including Ball Pass and Chancellor Hut) with a particular focus on what’s happened after major flood and erosion events.
What makes this study especially interesting is that it doesn’t just look at the physical changes to the landscape. It also examines how people respond. Whether that’s finding informal new routes, shifting public expectations, or proposed changes to how parks are managed. Technology developments and the increasing popularisation of backcountry travel are also part of the picture.
Overall, the study highlights some of the challenges but also the ways forward for looking after public access to natural environments in times of change.
What we need to get right
The study lays out three key things that matter for managing public access in NZ’s fast changing landscape:
- Keeping protected areas doing what they’re meant to do. Public access should support (not undermine) the core functions of places like national parks.
- Looking at the full picture. Impact assessments need to cover both the physical changes (erosion, glacier loss) and the human responses to them, from informal new tracks to formal management decisions.
- Managing competing expectations. When landscapes were more stable, expectations were that infrastructure would always be there or would be replaced after damage. In a changing climate, that’s not always realistic, and navigating those tensions between different stakeholders is increasingly part of the job.
Why this matters for our community
As a community founded on the love of the outdoors, this research hits close to home. These are our playgrounds. Ball Pass is on many a bucket list. The changes documented here aren’t abstract or distant; they’re happening on routes that Kiwi adventurers have been travelling for generations, and they’re accelerating.
Understanding how landscapes are changing, and how we respond to those changes as a society, is essential if we want to keep people connected to nature in a way that’s safe, sustainable, and honest about what climate change is doing to our mountains.
The full paper is open-access and well worth your time to read. The before-and-after imagery of the places and routes you probably know well is worth the click alone.
