I love tramping, or as it’s known in the USA, backpacking. Having visited a fair number of New Zealand backcountry huts, I became curious about which huts I’ve visited (and which ones I haven’t). Naturally, it was time for a data visualization project!

After much hemming and hawing on how to display the data, I settled on building maps (one per island) and a checklist. Note - the maps are best viewed on a computer screen, but in a pinch, a smartphone in landscape mode will get the idea across.

• North Island map: link
• South Island/Stewart Island map: link
• Master checklist: link

A few remarks on the data and the “rules”:

• The exhaustive list of DOC huts was downloaded from the NZ government data portal on 23 April 2023. It includes 944 huts total.
• I have visited a few huts which are not in the DOC list. I decided to include them in the checklist. They are marked as “not DOC maintained”.
• I count a hut as visited if I slept in it, stopped in to eat lunch, or walked out front of it on the track. If I saw it from a distance, that doesn’t count.

Endnotes:

• Many thanks to DOC and the New Zealand government for making the hut data freely available at https://catalogue.data.govt.nz/dataset/doc-huts3. And of course, many thanks to DOC for operating and maintaining such a fine system of backcountry huts!
• The code to generate the hut maps is at https://github.com/mhalverson/huts. Feel free to adapt it for your own use.