New Zealand's Great Walks have a long history of over-enthusiastic packing, but few stories beat the one recalled in a letter to Wilderness Magazine: in the mid-1950s, a group hauled a full-size piano up part of the Milford Track, carting it from Sandfly Point at the Milford Sound end all the way to Quintin Hut, a backcountry shelter in the Clinton Valley well off the beaten track.
The letter was written in response to a feature about the Wellington Tramping and Mountaineering Club carrying a barbecue on a tramp — child's play, it turns out, compared with what trampers managed 70 years ago. The piano story comes from William (Bill) Anderson, who recorded the whole enterprise in his book. Getting a piano onto the track at all would have meant boat transport up Milford Sound or across Lake Te Anau to the track's remote start points, then sheer muscle over the kind of terrain that makes people sweat with a day pack. Nobody carried a grand up a river valley out of necessity — it was done for the fun of it, and for the music at the other end.
The Milford Track itself is a good hook for this kind of legend. Opened officially in 1908 and often called the finest walk in the world, it runs 53.5 kilometres from Glade Wharf on Lake Te Anau to Sandfly Point near Milford Sound, crossing the Mackinnon Pass at 1,154 metres. Today it's a bookable, hut-to-hut Great Walk run by the Department of Conservation, with numbers capped and a season that runs roughly late October to late April. The huts — including facilities near Quintin, which sits on the Clinton Valley stretch below the pass — are a far cry from what those 1950s trampers would have known, but the spirit of the place hasn't changed much: it still rewards people willing to carry things a long way uphill.
The piano tale is a reminder of how much personality the New Zealand backcountry carries. Clubs like the Wellington Tramping and Mountaineering Club have been running trips for decades, and the country's hut culture — where strangers cook together, sing, and swap stories — grew directly out of that tradition. You won't find a piano at Quintin Hut on your walk (and you'd be mad to bring a ukelele, frankly), but knowing the history adds something to the day you spend climbing the Clinton Canyon toward Mackinnon Pass.
If the story tempts you onto the Milford, plan well ahead: independent walkers book huts through DOC months in advance, and guided walks sell out earlier still. Alternatively, the Routeburn and Kepler tracks offer similar Fiordland drama with slightly more flexible booking. But if you want to walk in the footsteps — or rather the bootprints — of the piano-haulers, the Milford is the one.
Story via Wilderness Magazine NZ.
