Those shoes weren’t meant for walking.

They say before you judge a person, you must walk a mile in their shoes. If that’s the case, I won’t be judging Gus Cope, because his shoes are a beaten pair of sweat-soaked jandals.
Once upon a time, Gus was camping with friends at the Routeburn Flats for a birthday party. He left his boots in the rain on accident, so someone suggested he carry on in jandals. He did. And then, for the hell of it, he decided he might as well do the other nine great walks in jandals, too. Why not? Thus began the Great Jandal.
Three years later, Gus was headed back to the Routeburn Track to finish what he started. Since he had done the first few kilometres in boots, and because Gus is a purist, he needed to redo the Routeburn. It was to be a victory lap after 574 kilometres of Great Walks. All in the same pair of trusty Havaianas. Despite my investigative nature, I did not give them a smell check.

I joined Gus’s victory party, a band of nine trampers whose experience ranged from summiting Emily Peak to literally having never been on a tramp before. The gear ranged from jandals to business casual to prepped-for-ten-days-survival. We set out from The Divide with our sights on the Valley of the Trolls and our noses plugged.
The Routeburn is, in my opinion, the greatest of the Great Walks. Granted, it’s the only Great Walk I’ve done, but I think I’m right and nobody corrected me. It was also entirely-jandalable, even as passing trampers oohed and aahed at Gus’s feet. Many had seen him that week, front-page on the Otago Daily Times. I asked his partner Tess what it was like to be with such a massive celebrity, and she said it was great because he has to do all the talking. Perhaps the greatest controversy surrounding Gus is that he prefers the term “piggies” to “dogs” when referring to his feet. Never meet your heroes, I guess.
There was no real purpose to the Great Jandal. A happy side-effect was that it gave Gus the chance to band together with friends a dozen-or-so times over the last few years and seek out the great outdoors. There’s also a vague link to charity. I suppose that’s noble, but we all know Gus was just out for glory.
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If the Routeburn was a victory lap, the Abel Tasman was a high-speed collision. An “absolute fuckin’ catastrophe”, according to one of his compatriots. Of all the Great Walks, Gus’s Icarian approach to achievement and casual aplomb faltered only this once. The crew had descended on the tramp at the same time as a major storm cell: August 2022. But it’s a Great Walk, and the crew was young and fit, so a bit of rain wasn’t to be feared. Besides, jandals are perfect for wet weather. No socks to worry about!
It was a disaster. Rains lashed the coast, tearing down hillsides and whole stands of trees. Streams that were normally a trickle roared to life as fully-fledged flood hazards. After hours spent crossing a slip, darkness (and several trampers) had fallen and the jandal pilgrimage was stuck on an unstable abutment. Shit had well and truly hit the proverbial fan. Making their way to the shore, the fellowship sought shelter in a toilet block, netting a few hours of uneasy rest as the weather brutalised the track.
In the end, the storm forced the evacuation of 70 homes and the declaration of a state of emergency for the Nelson region. It was the most rain the area had seen in 100 years.

The next morning, a pair of Department of Conservation (DOC) workers happened upon the crew and semi-reluctantly gave them a lift back to the trailhead. Instead of admonishing their choice of footwear or their disregard for the forecast, the rangers seemed more preoccupied with the Great Jandal stickers left in one of the huts. The mock-DOC souvenirs could get them in trouble with copyright law, you see. Because that was clearly the biggest problem here. (Legal note: this is absolutely not a violation of copyright law. DOC is a high-profile public entity, so parody law would enshrine your right to make spoof DOC stickers, so long as the intent is not malicious or pecuniary.)
The Abel Taz was meant to be the easiest, so perhaps this was nature’s way of reminding the Jandalers of their place. Nowhere else on the Great Jandal did danger loom so imminently. (Gus did return later return to complete the track.) The next-closest call was at Lake Waikaremoana, which Gus ran in a day, when overgrown trail conditions greatly delayed his return home. It was dark, but not dangerous.
The Whanganui Journey was a breeze, as this Great Walk is completed by canoe or, in part in this case, by “taking on the rapids on a giant inflatable jandal”. The Milford Track was run in a day as well, at a pace that Gus said at the time allowed him to “outrun an angry swan”. The Tongariro Northern Circuit was expected to pose a challenge to the structural integrity of Gus’s stompers, but the Havaianas persevered intact. The Rakiura Track was not dangerous, per say, but the mud proved a constant, slurping enemy. Gus did the Paparoa Track on a mountain bike. He duct taped jandals to his pedals and sent it like there’s no tomorrow (there were, in fact, many tomorrows). The critical thing about the setup, apparently, is that the plugs on the bottom of a jandal act as seatbelts, strapping you in for the ride ahead. Or below. Or overboard. The crew covered 90 kilometres in two days.
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By the time we sighted the Valley of the Trolls I felt I had learned all there was to learn about jandals. That is to say: I now understood that they were entirely appropriate for a Great Walk, assuming you are fit and keen and not foot-shy. In many ways they seemed superior to my boots, and I decided the next day I’d be wearing jandals, too. Things were looking peachy. Then we veered off the manicured Great Walk track and into Trolls, and things went downhill quickly.
The path is a steep and muddy descent flanked by flax and speargrass. It is an unpleasant experience even in normal gear, and the thought of doing it in tractionless slippers was laughable at best. It was, according to Gus, reminiscent of the Kepler Track’s back half, a downhill slog that produced the worst jandal wedgie ever to be wedged.
As soon as we took the slope, the party disbanded and took their own paces. Finishing a long day with its most difficult section is a ballsy proposal, as this nearly guarantees that your hikers will be at their weakest, most temperamental, most accident-prone and hangriest. And so it was that a mere twenty minutes into the valley someone called it quits, declared they weren’t walking another step, and set up camp on the only speck of grass in an otherwise rocky riverbed. I do not enjoy camping in riverbeds. It fills me with a sense of unease, and I’d only brought six spare pairs of socks. So much could go wrong.
Everything was fine, though, and we resumed the next morning for the final leg of the Great Jandal. Spirits were high as we passed the Routeburn Falls Hut, where the group wondered if anyone would recognise us (they didn’t) or if we’d be treated to a hero’s welcome (we weren’t). At the base of this valley is the Routeburn Flats campsite, essentially marking the completion of Gus’s pilgrimage. He walked to the site of his initial boot-soaking debacle and squatted, pointing at the start of his adventure. We looked around for a bit. Someone collected a stray blue Powerade bottle. And then we left. Sometimes reverence is fleeting.

As far as tramping goes, the path from the flats to the carpark is essentially a highway. I’ve often wondered if a “cakewalk” meant that the path was “easy as pie”, or if it indicates that you could literally carry a cake down the length of the trail. In either case the term is fitting. Hell, this was a cakerun.
At the final bridge, we sent a friend over to record Gus’s crossing. After three years of walking and working, all that was left were a few metres over churning cerulean waters. So much had built to this moment, with Gus at the centre of this world, prepared to pop a waiting bottle of champagne. And, Routeburn being Routeburn, there we had to wait as a pair of tourists took selfies on the bridge, oblivious to the history they were delaying.
When it finally came time to cross, Gus took it in great strides. As he planted one jandal, then the next, on the far side of achievement, it was one small step for man, one giant leap for jankind.
Fox Meyer