A two-bunk hut tucked into a remote north Canterbury valley has become the centre of a quiet tug of war between the Department of Conservation and the hunters, trampers and volunteers who say the little shelter has kept people alive in bad weather. The Evangeline Bivvy, near Lake Sumner in the Lake Sumner Forest Park, was knocked off its foundations by a storm in 2023, flown out by helicopter and parked on a nearby farm. Three years on, DOC wants to formally dispose of it, and the people who restored it are pushing back.
The bivvy was lovingly brought back to life by volunteers in 2019, only for a major weather event in 2023 to wash it off its base. Rather than reinstate the structure where it had stood, DOC removed it for safety and stored it while it worked out what to do next. The department has since described the hut as low use and low priority, with ongoing costs it does not think are justified. Its preferred path is to hand the bivvy to the Rod Donald Trust for use as a day shelter on the Te Ara Pātaka track on Banks Peninsula, a popular walking route a long way from the high-country valley the biv has always called home.
For the people who know the hut, that plan misses the point. Craig Benbow, a former chair of the Backcountry Trust, told RNZ that small remote shelters like Evangeline are worth far more than their visitor numbers suggest. “It’s fair to say it’s a low-use facility, no doubt about it, but we’ve got dozens of them across Canterbury,” he said. “The community highly values these remote places and remote structures because they’re life savers in bad weather.” Benbow argued that DOC had failed to follow proper disposal procedures and had not consulted the community before deciding the hut’s fate.
That sense of being shut out is shared by Richard Janssen, one of the volunteers who restored the bivvy in 2019. He said the structure remained sound and carried real history in the valley. “That little biv has got historic significance in that valley,” he said. “It’s a very special biv, structurally sound.” Janssen said volunteers had been excluded from decisions even though they had gone to the trouble of commissioning geotechnical reports on alternative sites where the hut might safely be reinstated. He described the department’s public notice as “a retroactive rear-guard kind of action”, a tidy-up exercise after the substantive decisions had already been made.
DOC has acknowledged a gap in how it handled the early stages. The department conceded that, until the public notification process began, it had not engaged directly with all the parties interested in the hut’s future. Operations manager Kirsty Milne said the department’s view had not shifted on the central question. “DOC’s position has remained that reinstating the bivvy at its original site was neither safe nor financially viable,” she said, adding that the shelter was low use and a low priority with ongoing costs. She framed the day-shelter idea as a way to keep the hut alive in a different form. “Repurposing the bivvy as a day shelter offers a practical future use that preserves its heritage values,” she said.
The two sides are not as far apart as the dispute might suggest. Benbow said an understanding had been reached that a shelter could be put back in the Evangeline Stream area provided DOC was not on the hook for paying for it or maintaining it. The department has also signalled it is in discussions with a separate interested group about building a new bivvy somewhere along Evangeline Stream, a structure that would be entirely owned, funded and managed by that group. In other words, the valley may yet get a hut again, just not the same one and not on DOC’s books.
The fight over one small biv sits inside a much bigger conversation about the future of New Zealand’s backcountry hut network. Thousands of huts and bivvies are scattered across the conservation estate, many of them built decades ago for deer cullers and forestry workers and now kept standing by volunteer trusts and weekend working bees. Benbow warned that other shelters face the same pressure as DOC looks to trim costs, and that the loss of any single hut chips away at a safety net that trampers and hunters rely on when the weather turns. Each shelter removed is one fewer dry place to wait out a storm in country where the weather can change in minutes.
People who want a say have until 5pm on Thursday 9 July 2026 to make a submission through the department’s have your say page on the disposal of Evangeline Bivvy. For the trampers and hunters who have hauled tools up the valley and slept two to a bunk while the rain hammered down outside, the consultation is a chance to argue that a hut’s worth cannot be measured by a counter on the door.
Have you sheltered in a backcountry biv when the weather turned, or pitched in on a hut working bee? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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