A lightweight plastic mountain hut that can withstand extreme conditions and be helicoptered to remote locations could be the future of back country accommodation and beyond.
The huts are called Turks and are built from 26,000 litre plastic water tanks, so are waterproof.
A club has been set up to build them and set them up, as well as to enjoy using them. There’s currently nine set up – three in Antarctica, and six in New Zealand, including on Treble Cone and Coronet Peak.
Adventurer and designer Erik Bradshaw told Checkpoint so far they had been built by volunteers and were cheaper than some traditional mountain huts.
He had wanted to find a way to make mountaineering a more comfortable experience, to encourage people to venture out into the great outdoor more.
A Turk hut among the mountains at Vanguard Peak, near Queenstown.
Photo: Supplied/ Mountain Turk Club
“Many nights” spent in frozen cold ice-covered tents motivated him to come up with a new solution.
“I thought of the idea of carrying sacks of cement into the mountains and plastering rocks together and things like that …I wasn’t the first to think of all the different uses of a plastic water tank, but I definitely took the quality of it to a new standard.”
Bradshaw said the Turks were round, 10m2, with four bunks each and were double-glazed and fully insulated.
They had cooking facilities inside and a toilet in a separate building.
The inside of a Turk mountain hut at Vanguard Peak, Queenstown
Photo: Supplied/ Mountain Turk Club
“So even though it might be say minus 10 degrees outside, with four people inside, it’s a comfortable temperature,” he said.
“They have all the sort of stuff that makes your pack heavy when you go into the mountains already in them, so you can pretty well go in with kind of a day pack and light-weight food and have a really enjoyable night or two.”
The Turks are light enough to be choppered out to their sites, but to stop them being blown away by the wind a cavity below a false floor allowed for 3 tonnes of gravel to be loaded into each one to hold it down.
Bradshaw said each Turk cost about $20,000 to build and install – working out to about $5000 per bunk.
By comparison, he said Department of Conservation (DOC) huts cost about $50,000 to $70,000 per bunk to build – working out at about $700,000 for a ten-bunk hut.
So while the Turks could not sleep large groups “as far as a small hut it’s incredible”, he said.
A Turk mountain hut at Deep Creek, near Wānaka
Photo: Supplied/ Mountain Turk Club – Shayne Galloway
At the moment there were none on DOC land.
“There’s a huge community support to build these things … I’m just doing it for the love and fun, and getting together with good people,” Bradshaw said.
“The difficult part in this project is working through the bureaucracy, and just getting the permission to build them. Then once you’ve got the permission, to get 50 people together to go ‘yahoo, let’s do this, let’s make it happen’ is quite easy.
“I’ve yet to tackle the Department of Conservation.”
Bradshaw speculated the Turks could also be a useful low-cost solution for situations like emergency housing in a disaster. But he stipulated that if road access to sites was available then there were already a wide range of other alternatives – whereas the Turks were unique in their suitability to be helicoptered onto a site.
Bradshaw said he was happy to share the design without charging for the intellectual property, but that he was cautious about ensuring that anyone who adopted the idea built their own Turk to a high standard.
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