#TBT: You Shall Not Paast

Rewind the calendar to December 10 and let’s get back to the TA.

 Today’s ride could have been written by Gary Gygax. (For the insufficiently nerdy, he’s the dude who created Dungeons & Dragons.) Most bike rides don’t have a plot, but this one followed the classic D&D module formula turn for turn. The quest: climb the mountain, reach Haast Pass, and defeat whatever foes you find there.

First up, four hours of riding through the cover art of the fantasy novel section of the bookstore. (In truth, that’s not a D&D thing, it’s an NZ thing. The whole country looks like this.) Strange birds, misty mountains, waterfalls galore. This is the valley of the Landsborough River, whose placard describes it as “a major river, 50 km long.” New Zealand is small enough that thirty miles qualifies a river as “major.” There’s nothing too harrowing in your first four hours of hills. Like any good D&D adventure, the first few challenges are just to wear you down and deplete your resources. It’s at the end of this that you reach your first truly Gygaxian sight: a bike-eating tree.

Defeat the tree and you’ll soon find a steep canyon filled with the roar of a raging river. It’s impossible to cross except by the Gates of Haast. In any other country this would be called Haast Bridge, but not here, and not in D&D. Here you get the Gates of Haast. I would love to tell you Haast is the name of a demon or war god or something, but it turns out he’s just an explorer (though one whose resumé Gary Gygax would have appreciated).

After braving the Gates, you face four kilometers of nonstop saving throws as the mountain tries to break your body and spirit. The hike-a-bike is so steep it feels like you’re pushing square tires. (Or perhaps that’s just the evil magic of this place.) You fear this will go on for the whole ten-kilometer ascent, but just as in a well-designed adventure, this boss monster is scary but beatable. Perhaps the mountain becomes less steep, or perhaps it’s the waterfalls that heal your soul—Elvish magic, you hope, to counter the hexes you’ve suffered so far. But I checked: there was no Lord of the Rings filming up here, so no elves for you.

Magic or not, the waterfalls give you a chance to rest. Three big falls—Roaring Billy, Thunder Creek, and Fantail—all worth dismounting to explore. At Fantail Falls you find a curious puzzle to solve. This is good; there should always a challenge for the skillful characters. Hundreds of people have come before you and left tiny cairns on a fallen tree. Why do they do it? Only Gygax knows. The puzzle you must solve is this: those before you have already taken every single surface where rocks will stack, so how will you put your own little cairn on the tree?

My answer: make a new horizontal surface. I found a long tongue-shaped rock I could sneak into a little crevice, and a teensy tiny wedge-shaped one to secure it. Voilà! Who knows what evil could have befallen me if I hadn’t solved the puzzle and built a little cairn on my brand new tabletop.

There are booby-trapped bridges too. Ten may cross, but eleven will die. There are pit traps one inch deep. Beware!

At last you reach the summit, where you learn the Māori name for Haast Pass, Tioripatea, means “Looks Clear.” That wasn’t so bad, you say to yourself. But once again Gygax proves he’s wilier than you are. Your quest was to “defeat whatever foes you find at the pass” but it turns out your worst enemy is yourself. You’d planned to camp at the pass—not legally, strictly speaking, but there’s a hiking trail, and you’ve camped on those before. But the DM and the DOC have outsmarted you: the trail is entirely hilly until it becomes impassable by bike. The only way to camp up here is to leave the bike behind and schlep all your gear uphill in search of level ground. Ugh.

Or, if that quest seems hopeless, you can ride to the next legal campsite. But that’s another twenty kilometers away, and you’ve biked 64 km already. The farthest you’ve ever ridden is 72, and the day after you had to hitchhike to the nearest hot spring. Ugh.

What will you do? Hazard the hill or risk the road? If you’re me, you’re not lugging all that gear without a backpack. Screw that. I was tired as hell, but surely the rest of the mountain is, y’know, all downhill from here.

Of course it’s not. This is New Zealand. “Flat” means “not the steepest part” and “downhill” means “down except for all the climbs.” So I logged a new personal record for distance, 75 kilometers, and found a good campsite halfway between the summit and Makarora.

You’d think my legs would be much stronger by now. My hitchhike was forty-three days ago, over a thousand kilometers north of the Gates of Haast. (“Rest Day Part I: It’s Nothing, Mate,” way back on October 29.) 72 km was too much then, but now… surely 75 is okay. Right?

Wrong. The next day I make it a whopping nine kilometers to Makarora, a mere speck of a town and one sadly lacking when it comes to hot springs. I make do with a proper bed, a hot shower, and a fistful of anti-inflammatories. I defeated the mountain, but not without cost. A fitting end to a proper boss monster fight.