10/03/2026
Sometimes you lose your marbles...
We started stage 4 of The MAGNIficent mid pack, where we had to navigate deep inside the Southland bush, with very little features to help us figure out our location, no tracks, no open tops, just small hills covered in dense vegetation top to bottom.
We started this stage by rushing ahead and missed the turn off in one of the only short track sections. 6h later, after looking for CP9 in the complete wrong location (“Black horn”), we decided to retrace our steps all the way back to transition and try again. This time we were in the correct spot and found the control, but still with difficulty.
We then moved towards CP10, a tree on an indistinct spur, we left an abandoned track too early, sidled for too long, wasted too much energy, so we headed down a creek junction to have a solid attack point, we set camp in the cold gully, half slept half shivered and collected CP10 first thing in the morning.
CP11 was straight forward, we followed a creek to the junction where we collected it without any difficulty. Maybe CP11 was too easy, because we headed straight away in the wrong direction, going up the wrong spur. The plan was to stay at 200m elevation all the way to CP12, a majestic waterfall. For some reason we lost our bearings and elevation, going down to the main catchment while we thought we were going across a side stream. There was a beautiful waterfall there, so beautiful it made us question ourselves, was it the CP12? Did we lose contact with the map and stumbled on the waterfall by luck? We stick to our original plan but the contours didn’t add up, nothing made sense with the map so we decided that was the correct waterfall (it wasn’t ) and came back to it.
And this is where we collectively lost our marbles. We retraced our steps but we couldn’t find the same waterfall again, there was one waterfall, but it was a different one, so we went up stream to find it, with no luck.
We then went down hill, where we were reassured by footprints (our own footprints) , went past another waterfall, but still, it wasn’t the same one! We lost all contact with the map and we had no clue where we were. We just knew we were somewhere along the main catchment in a 10km radius.
The truth, looking at the official tracking and Tim’s GPS watch after the race, is that we actually came back to the waterfall, twice.
We just didn’t recognize it, because we lost all sense of reality, the way we remembered the waterfall wasn’t how it was.
We took the desperate decision to head East and problem solve on the way to make contact back with he map. We had to get out of the Catlins bush eventually.
After 10h of walking and constantly deviating from the bearing (according to the GPS tracking), we identified two ridge lines on the map stacking up with what we could see. An easy way to find out was to go North, if we encountered a shallow gully, we were on the ridge line leading to TA, if it was a deep gully, we were on the next southern ridge line, which means we should then cross that deep gully and climb to the ridge line on the other side, leading us to TA.
Going North, we encountered a deep gully, we confirmed our hypothesis and we found our way out.
The Southland bush chewed us alive, played with our sense of reality, and made us lose our marbles.
We were thrown off by having a single detailed map, it revealed our biggest weakness, which was our inability to navigate as a team.
The Southland bush was unforgiving, the only appropriate approach was to use collective intelligence instead of relying on a single brain, especially when we are hallucinating!
In the end it was a great lesson and we have learnt so much from this experience, thanks to the Magni team for this humbling lesson, bringing us down to earth.
