Tracing Māori jade tradition alongside the TranzAlpine rail route in New Zealand

The fireplace roars inside Sugarloaf, the lodge’s restaurant, set inside a protracted corridor whose vaulted ceiling and sun-drenched home windows resemble a contemporary tackle a Māori marae (gathering home). Opposite the open kitchen, on prime of a fridge full of cured beef, mackerel and duck, sit rows of hand-labelled jars containing pickled walnuts, strawberries, onion flowers and fennel. Head chef Taylor Cullen tells me that his group domesticate and forage what they will from the kitchen’s gardens through the summer season months, then ferment, remedy and protect every thing they will to make it final the space in winter.

The powerful alpine situations imply artistic options are wanted for survival. It’s a problem Keefe tells me his ancestors would have confronted as they braved the mountain. While they’d have traversed longer, lower-altitude trails many of the 12 months and out of doors winter, in some circumstances necessity and pace would have pushed them to courageous the upper and shorter Arthur’s Pass. It was the Southern Alps’ most tough crossing.

To see how they survived, we head to close by Kura Tawhiti, a hill topped with weathered karst boulders overlooking the golden tundra. Sculpted by thousands and thousands of years of wind and rain, and buckling in components the place the limestone has worn skinny, Kura Tawhiti’s numerous cracks and overhangs sheltered iwi households and conflict events traversing Arthur’s Pass. By the 1860s, throughout New Zealand’s gold rush, European settlers rode by way of in horse-drawn wagons, ever looking out for gold robbers. Today, younger New Zealanders haul mattresses up from the automotive park to practise bouldering underneath the imperious gaze of golden-winged falcons.

It’s a fantastical place, and it’s straightforward to lose your self exploring. As Keefe and I climb up and down and shimmy between boulders, he explains how the hill served an important function for Ngāi Tahu travelling alongside pounamu trails as a mahinga kai — a dependable stopping place for meals and shelter. “Kura Tawhiti means ‘a distant place where you find treasure’,” he says. “It was where east and west coast families could meet to share kai (food) and resources.”

For the Ngāi Tahu who rested right here, the resident Haast’s eagle would have been on the menu. An immense 40lb fowl of prey with a 10ft wingspan, it impressed legends of man-eating monsters earlier than it was hunted to extinction. Iwi would even have hunted the bright-green kākāpo, the world’s largest (and flightless) parrot. Now critically endangered, the fowl is a goal for conservation as an alternative of dinner.