The Kiwis who choose risk over the couch

In a new book, veteran adventurer Ray Salisbury tells the stories of great and sometimes terrifying journeys of Aotearoa and those who made them. Naomi Arnold talks to Salisbury and asks – what drives these people?

When 19-year-old Brando Yelavich was making his 8000km, 600-day circumnavigation of New Zealand in 2014, he faced pain, injury and death pretty much daily. On an Ōamaru beach he was attacked by a wild dog, which he had to kill. In Canterbury he got stuck on an electric deer fence, which shocked him 14 times before he could free himself. Perhaps the closest near-miss was while Yelavich was packrafting Southland’s Waiau River and dam control gates opened upstream, releasing a raging torrent that slammed into him, flipped him and trapped him underwater, where he struggled until he knew he was about to die:

“It was the most peaceful moment of my whole life. I had total clarity. I could feel everything that was going on – the water was a beautiful sapphire colour as it moved over my skin. I could see stones rolling around like little green gems and the current was cold and fresh. It was the most amazing feeling. It was just pure and peaceful…”

Then he blacked out. His lifejacket eventually popped him to the surface.

Yelavich’s tale is condensed in Epic, a new book of New Zealand adventure tales by outdoors writer Ray Salisbury. He says Yelavich’s is “the most life-affirming and death-defying” in the book, but that could apply to any one of the adventures Salisbury has collected.

Salisbury, a Nelson author and photographer, says he was inspired to create Epic while binge-listening to former podcast The Wild, hosted by photographer Andrew Macdonald and writer Jonathan Carson. He had “a lightbulb moment” while listening to the string of modern New Zealand adventurers the pair interviewed in each episode.

“That would make a good book,” he thought. And it has.

Salisbury’s words and images will be well-known to Kiwis who love their tramping. Raised in Auckland, he’s spent his life making the New Zealand outdoors his playground and study. His love for wild places was sparked during nine years in the Boys’ Brigade, which saw him adventuring in the Waitakere and Coromandel Ranges, as well as kayaking and canoeing the Whanganui, Tongariro, Buller and Clarence Rivers, all in his teens. He became a photographer on the same day he became a tramper.

“I picked up a camera and took it to Fairy Falls in the Waitakere Ranges,” he says. “It was a tiny little Hanimex 126 and I pointed it at the bush and clicked the button and I’ve never stopped.”

He has spent 25 years writing for Wilderness magazine, bagged at least 500 backcountry huts, and published four books. One, Tableland, covers the history of the fascinating alpine plateau in eastern Kahurangi National Park behind Mt Arthur/Tu Ao Wharepapa, and is full of Salisbury’s photographs and tales about those who lived and worked in this much-loved area of Nelson’s backcountry. He’s actually the great-great grandson of John Park Salisbury, whose brother Thomas explored the Tableland in 1863, and after whom the beloved Salisbury Lodge is

For Epic, Salisbury chose 11 great adventures from the past 50 years, all of which the authors have written about in their own books, blogs and articles. The stories have already lit the fires of adventure under many Kiwis. As well as "Wildboy" Yelavich, they include Lisa Tamati, who ran the length of New Zealand; Sir Graeme Dingle and Jill Tremain’s famous 1971 traverse of the Southern Alps; and Tara Mulvany and Sim Grigg, who attempted to kayak around the South Island in winter but broke up along the way – only Mulvany finished, becoming the youngest person to do so. Also featuring are tales from Steve Gurney (with whom Salisbury tramped and once shared a Boys’ Brigade cross-country running trophy) Te Araroa founder Geoff Chapple, and more.

“I wanted to condense these long epics into accessible manageable stories,” he says. He likens the group of wilderness tales in Epic to the Boy’s Own adventure stories he used to enjoy as a child. With a degree in graphic design, he also created maps, chose and retouched the images, and did all his own design and pagination. And as well as re-telling his adventurers’ narrative journeys, he did further research, weaving in some New Zealand history and interviewing who he could. But he found several adventurers very difficult to track down.

“They disappear – they’re off the beaten path.”

In most cases these stories are only one from a lifetime of adventure. Mulvany, for example, went on to become the first woman to circumnavigate New Zealand's three main islands by sea kayak, traversed the Southern Alps from Nelson Lakes to Fiordland, and also completed the first-ever sea kayak circumnavigation of the Arctic Svalbard archipelago, encountering 40 polar bears over 2200kms of paddling in 71 days.

They’re people who feel happiest and most complete when outside. Salisbury says our increasing alienation and divorce from the natural world saddens him. He points out that the World Health Organisation has calculated we spend 93 per cent of our life indoors, now far removed from the days when we needed to engage with the wilderness to find food, to build shelter, travel, or to escape. He tells a typical story from not that long ago – his own great-great grandfather was once stuck in New Plymouth and was trying to rendezvous with family arriving in Wellington. Aged 20, he walked the Taranaki coastline to Whanganui with his Māori guide, who stopped there to attend a tangi. On blistered feet, Salisbury’s ancestor carried on along the Kāpiti Coast to Wellington, a 350km journey he could make no other way – there were no roads.

Inspired by Dingle, Salisbury has completed his own epic journey, a solo 80-day, 1000km traverse of the North Island mountain ranges in the 1990s, which he wrote about in his book Cape to Cape, an account of which concludes Epic. He was the first person to make the crossing alone.

So he’s a good person to ask – why do people do this? Six hundred days, like Yelavich, coasteering around New Zealand aged 19, shooting goats and seagulls for food, falling off cliffs, nearly drowning in sea caves and rivers?

“There are a huge range of motivations for people to do multi-day expeditions,” Salisbury says.

Some are addicted to the flow state you enter into after an extended period of time in the hills. Some because it’s there; some because they need to escape demons or drugs; others because they prefer the bush to people; some to win, to beat a time and be the best.

“Lisa Tamati had a childhood dream to run the length of the country and she couldn’t shake it; some angel whispered in her ear,” he says. “Graeme Dingle was inspired by the Italian Walter Bonatti; he had done a ski traverse of the Alps in winter and [Dingle] thought he could do the first ever winter traverse of the Southern Alps.”

Salisbury’s own reasons for attempting his epic, he writes in the book’s introduction, were “to take time out from the rigours of existence, bag lots of huts and ask the age-old question, ‘Do I have what it takes?’” Indeed he did – his journey was life-changing.

A valuable addition to the book for keen expeditioners who want to create their own epics is the appendix, which contains material never before published: a list of New Zealand traverses, compiled with the help of Shaun Barnett and Alastair McDowell, plus a list of kayak circumnavigations, compiled with Paul Caffyn. Most of those entries also have a magazine, journal, or blog reference to help readers discover more about the trips, creating hundreds more stories of inspiration, experience and advice.

For Salisbury’s next book, he wants to write a walking guide for the Nelson region and is looking for funding to do so. He’s still asked to give talks on Tableland, and now he’s hoping this newest tale of hardship, deprivation, grit and achievement will give Kiwis young and old a chance to imagine something epic for themselves.

“I hope it will inspire a new generation of outdoor adventurers,” he says. “Even if they’re the armchair variety.”