Armed with rubber gloves and cleaning supplies, helpers trek through the wilderness to spruce up remote huts dotted across the country

From two-person shelters to a 54-bunk fortress, New Zealand’s countryside is scattered with huts that offer weary hikers a safe place to rest. Some huts sit along the popular Milford and Routeburn tracks, others are perched in remote valleys in the wilderness, with views ranging from snowy peaks to flourishing bush.

But the publicly owned network is too vast for the government to maintain, so ordinary people in New Zealand are filling their backpacks with cleaning supplies and hiking into the hills to clean and maintain the huts.