Make sure your coffee table is stout if you buy
Shelter From The Storm: The Story of New Zealand's
Backcountry Huts (Craig Potton).
Shaun Barnett, Rob Brown and Geoff Spearpoint - all prominent
outdoor authors and/or photographers - have produced a tome
that weighs nearly 3kg.
It contains 364 large glossy pages, with as many or more
photographs, frequently outstanding and lots of historic
interest.
Naturally, I headed Otago way first, with several huts
familiar to me. I now feel the urge to visit the others.
Pictured is Meg Hut, in the Pisa Range, near Cardrona.
Many huts had to be left out, because only 90 of the 1000 or
more scattered around our tramping, hunting and recreational
paradise received individual (or cluster) profiles.
The book builds around themes: pastoral huts, mining huts,
huts for tourism and climbing, club huts, Internal Affairs
Department huts, Forest Service huts, National Park Board and
Lands and Survey huts, Doc huts, huts and monuments and
science huts.
I suspect it might be years before I read about them all. In
the meantime, however, I appreciated going through the
background chapters and most of the southern profiles.
The research seems thorough and the writing is competent,
complementing those fabulous pictures.
The book will now lie around to be browsed whenever I'm in
the mood for a vicarious outdoor experience (quite often,
dare I say), or perhaps when I'm in need of a little weight
training.
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