Misapprehensions About Bears

            Last week I ended up going to Seward to get a tooth looked at, which fortunately turned out to be fine.   I was in town for just over 16 hours, and went back to the Iceberg Lodge a day early because of the atrocious marine forecast for the following day.   The night I got back, the wind started blowing hard enough that the lodge’s broken roof cap (damaged by the heavy snowfall earlier in the season)  was flapping in the wind like a thunder sheet, lending a dinner theatre ‘dark and stormy night’ sort of atmosphere to the evening.   (At times, it also sounded like someone racking up a dozen of the world’s largest pool balls.)   Apparently, one of the maintenance men climbed up on the roof sometime after midnight and screwed down the flapping roof bit to keep it from breaking itself or anything else it was banging against.   In other news, the tarp over our kayaks is apparently shredded beyond all hope of repair, (and this was the assessment of someone who makes a habit of keeping around a lot of ratty, useless tarps).   I haven’t looked at it myself, since the beach was something of a no-go zone for most of the morning, due to the high winds.   There were sustained winds in the 40 mph range, gusting up to 70mph, which made it difficult even to walk around.   Also, those winds speeds are enough to turn ordinary beach sand into weaponized projectiles; the guys who were out scouting the beach were wearing ski goggles.   Fortunately, the wind died down enough for the boat to make it out here the following day, although they had a very rough ride coming out.   Now we have only 19 guests in camp, down from 38 the previous day.   That day was the last full house of the season, and it would have been very Iceberg-Lodge-typical if the last full house stretched into another night because we couldn’t get the departing guests back to Seward.   Sometimes, it seems like this place enjoys finding ways to screw us over – massive snow, epic rain, week-long gales, marauding wildlife, exploding septic systems, etc…. 

            Now that we’re back to very small numbers of guests, my job has gotten a whole lot easier.    I’ve had two great days of guiding, despite the fact that it’s been raining constantly.   Such as, nature hikes with only two people, and kayak trips with only one guest.   One of the guests was from Kenya, and a birder, who was talking about lions walking through his property last month…    Later that afternoon, I went out with just one guest, M, who is also in the tourism business.   We took a double kayak to the upper lagoon, and paddled as much open water as we could find.   The icebergs are close to being as melted out as they are going to get this season, so we were able to explore in a lot of nooks and corners.   There were also 50-60 seals in the water, and it was a really fun trip.  

            Then today, M and I went to Aialik Glacier, again as a solo trip.   It was a great trip for several reasons – trips with only one guest in no way resemble actual work, because all of the crowd control and group management issues magically vanish.   You just get to go out and paddle, and talk about seals, which is sort of what I do on my days off, anyway.   We were also able to get to a part of the glacier’s moraine that I haven’t been able to get to for nearly a month, thanks to a change in the glacier’s melt-water route, which has cut a new river right down the middle of our old landing beach.   (How that happened is a story worthy of its own blog post.)  Today, M and I were able to paddle around the melt-water and land on a sketchy, boulder-heavy part of the beach, which was manageable only because I only had one boat to worry about.   I dragged the kayak across the boulders and tied it off to a rock above the storm shelf.   From there, we were able to walk out along the moraine to a bluff overlooking the glacier, and up to the side of the glacier itself.   The glacier has been advancing along that side all summer, and is pushing a pile of rocks ahead of it like a bulldozer.    In June, there was a big quartz rock about thirty feet from the ice that we used as a ‘do not pass’ barrier.   That rock is now totally covered by ice.   I estimate the glacier has come forward by about 60-80 feet in the past three months.   That’s around 8 inches a day or something in that range.    The rubble pile in front of the ice is close to seven feet tall now, and it’s starting to plow through a small stand of alders, which are being slowly uprooted and buried.   It’s like watching a slow-motion bulldozer. Not having seen that section of the glacier for nearly a month makes the speed of the ice’s advance even more apparent.   Also, walking around and exploring on the moraine was good because it gave us something to do on land, as opposed to spending the whole tour sitting in a kayak, in the pouring rain.   

            Also at the Aialik moraine, we saw a calving event large enough to produce a wave high enough to prove my point about the danger of glacier-caused tsunami waves - but not high enough to actually wipe us from the face of the earth, which is nice.   (About one tour in a hundred ends up running for their lives rapidly evacuating to higher ground somewhere on the Aialik moraine.)    

            Also a bonus, there was a bear in the meadow all day today.   We saw him when we went out to set up the boats, where he appeared to vaguely pay attention to our ATVs.   Walking out with M at the beginning of our tour, the bear sat up long enough to give us a blank stare, and then lay back down even before M could take a picture.   Walking back to the lodge five hours later, he was still in the same place, grazing on grass in the rain.   Usually, guests here are afraid of bears up until the moment they actually see one.   Our bears are freakishly tolerant of people, and they spend a lot of time eating grass.   They are sort like cows, except with way better PR.   It’s hard to be mortally terrified of an animal that won’t even bother to sit up when you walk by.   Not to say that the bears aren’t dangerous, because they can be.   If you surprise a bear, or get between a bear and food, or a bear and cubs, then all bets are off.   But mostly, the bears aren’t interested in being predatory.   They’re just here for the salmon.

            The closest I’ve gotten to a bear this year was hiking a section of trail near Pedersen Glacier that we don’t normally use.   The bear heard us coming, and decided to climb up a spruce tree and wait us out.   Which was very sensible of the bear.   Unfortunately, the tree the bear picked was (a) not very tall, and (b) right next to the trail we were hiking down.   I didn’t see the bear until we were under the tree.    The bear let out a howl, probably because he thought we were deliberately going after him, and scrambled a few feet further up the trunk.   Instant chaos for about thirty seconds, as me and the line of guests behind me abruptly reverse direction and beat a hasty retreat.   We watched the bear for about two minutes from further down the trail, which was long enough for the guests to all take pictures, and for the bear to start making noises complaining about when we were going to back off and let him get out of the damn tree.    We bushwhacked through the alders for about thirty yards to detour around the bear at a safe distance.   The two young boys on the trip thought the bear encounter was the coolest thing ever, and were pestering me for bear stories for the rest of the hike.    Then back at the lodge, they were telling their very own bear story to anyone who would listen.

            The bears are one thing that makes living out here very interesting.   The bears are our neighbors, and they wander through camp like they own the place sometimes.   Also, bears are one of the big things that people from Outside associate with Alaska.   It came up a lot in New Zealand when I told people where I was from.   “Hi, my name is Mareth; I’m from Alaska.   Allow me to correct your misapprehensions about bears.”

Where the Waterfalls Are: Four Days on the Milford Track

            I’m back from four days on the Milford Track and two days in Milford Sound itself.   The trip was amazing, with this year’s unusually dry autumn weather persisting through the entire trip.   Planning for this trip, I was prepared to be soaking wet from the time I got off the boat at the trailhead, to the moment I arrived back in Te Anau.   However, there was only about two hours of rain while we were hiking, plus a few showers in the fjord the day after I finished the hike.   

Boarding the boat at Te Anau Downs

            The Milford Track starts out with a bus ride from the DOC center in Te Anau, followed by a forty-five minute boat trip to the northern end of Lake Te Anau, where we got off with out bags, took pictures standing next to the trailhead sign, and started on our way.   The first day’s hiking, starting as it does at around 3pm, is only about three kilometers – and less for the guided hike walkers.   (They stay in fancier lodges, and don’t have to carry food, cooking gear, or sleeping bags – but the downside is that their hiking days and distances aren’t broken up as logically as the independent walkers staying in the DOC huts.)   We passed the first guided walk lodge (Glade House), sniffed wistfully at the food smells drifting from the kitchen, and continued down the track through mossy forest towards Clinton Hut, and our foil bags of freeze-dried food.   Clinton Hut is perched at the edge of a wetland area, and there is a great view of the surrounding mountains from the helicopter landing pad next to the hut.   I stashed my gear in the bunkhouse, and joined about half of the hikers for a nature walk given by the hut ranger.   One of the things he pointed out was a set of kiwi tracks nosing through the mud near the hut.   This is exciting because kiwi are still quite rare, even in places as remote as Fiordland National Park, due to pressure from introduced predators, like stoats.   The Milford Track, among other places in Fiordland, has an intensive stoat and possum trapping program, designed to keep the populations of these introduced species at a level low enough that the native birds species are still able to raise chicks without invasive mammals eating their eggs.   Pink triangular markers indicate where the traps are; they dot the trail like randomly placed trail blazes.   I asked one of the rangers how many traps there were on the trail, and she lost count somewhere north of 200 - which is already an average of about six per mile.

            That evening in the hut, I made the acquaintance of six Australian women who were hiking the trail, and ended up whole-heartedly adopting me as a dinner companion and hiking buddy.   They were brilliant, and getting to know such fantastic ladies was definitely one of the best parts about the trip. 

            It rained very heavily that night, and we woke up the next morning hastily changing into waterproof layers, and wrestling with pack covers and plastic liners.   Because it’s late in the season, it would be dark when we got up in the morning, and dark when we finished eating dinner.   If you can imagine a bunkroom full of forty hikers, all wearing headlamps, scrambling around trying to pack their gear in the dark, it sort of looks like a wilderness laser light show.   This scene repeated itself morning and evening for the whole trip; it was actually quite entertaining.  

Getting organized at Dumpling Hut

            The second day turned out misty.   The rain the night before had been heavy enough to turn on the waterfalls coming down the sides of the valley, but not heavy enough to flood the trail.   The waterfalls are one of the many celebrated features of walking the Milford Track.   One of the purported benefits to hiking the track in very rainy weather is that the more rain the track gets, the more numerous and spectacular the waterfalls become.   That being said, really heavy rain can also completely flood out the trail, as well as the whole valley, in fairly short order.   Many of the low-lying sections of trail had yellow-topped metal poles set every twenty to thirty feet to show where the trail is during flooding.   According to the Mintaro Hut ranger, walking through thigh-high water in parts of the trail is not uncommon.   Occasionally, the flooding can get so bad that the trail is completely impassable, and in these instances, the DOC will either hold everyone in the hut for an extra day, or use helicopters to ferry hikers past the flooded sections of trail.   This is one of the many huge advantages to hiking one of the Great Walks.   For a modest fee of $50 per night, you not only get a decent mattress, a flush toilet, a gas stove, a friendly ranger, and an up-to-date weather report, but you also get access to helicopter transport should things go terribly wrong.   One reason that New Zealand is so good at running world-class wilderness hiking trails is that they have been doing it for a long time.   New Zealand was the first country in the world to have a Department of Tourism (started somewhere around 1903), which helped to establish and fund guided eco-tourism operations about a century before the rest of the world.    Actually, the Milford Track itself was once hiked exclusively by catered, guided parties.   This changed in the mid sixties, when New Zealand trampers began agitating that they have equal access to their own wilderness areas, without having to pay for the services of a guide.   In what must have been one of the most fun protests in the history of wilderness protest movements, a group of trampers hiked the Milford track independently, carrying their own tents and food, setting up what has become the model for independent walking on DOC-managed hiking trails.

Lake near the trail, in the Clinton Valley

            Contrary to Peter the hut ranger’s expectations, the rain stopped around mid-morning, the clouds burnt off, and we started seeing more of the tops of the surrounding mountains.   Except that calling them mountains might give the wrong impression.   Thousand-foot lengths of sheer vertical cliff face might be a more accurate description.   

            Blanche Edith Broughton was one of the first writers to popularize the Milford Track, after writing an article describing her experiences on the trail in the early 1900s.   She coined the phrase ‘the finest walk in the world’, which, a century later, is still frequently used to describe the Milford Track.   Ms. Broughton also described the surrounding country as a land dominated by the vertical.   The valleys in Fiordland are glacially-carved, and have the classic glacier valley profile – steep sides, with a wider, flatter bottom.   However, what makes Fiordland’s valleys unique is that the rock the glaciers carved through is very, very hard – hard enough that even over thousands of years, very little rock from those steep sides has eroded away.   Basically, this means that the valleys in Fiordland are just as steep as when the glaciers left – the sides aren’t just steep, they’re actually sheer cliffs.   This topographical anomaly is breathtaking enough, but the other defining characteristic of Fiordland’s valleys is the amount of rain they receive – about 8 meters on average in most places.   This sort of terrain creates waterfalls in abundance, most of them only active during or after heavy rain.   Even on days when the waterfalls aren’t going, its easy to see the marks on the cliff faces where they run; vertical stripes of slightly smoothed rock running down the otherwise greenery-covered cliffs.

            The bare places on the cliffs that aren’t waterfalls are usually old landslides.   Because the terrain is so steep, and the soil layer over the bedrock is very thin, landslides are a common form of plant succession.   Most of the trees that are able to grow on the cliffs do so because their roots are intertwined with other trees, which forms a supportive lattice.   However, when the soil layer becomes saturated with water, it can become so heavy that an entire patch of soil slides right off of the mountain, taking all of the intertwined trees tumbling downhill with it like a row of dominoes.

Lake Mintaro, near the second DOC hut

            For most of the second day, we hiked along the Clinton river, following it up to its headwaters below the Mackinnon Pass.   The trail is very forested, green, and enclosed, but it regularly passes through avalanche chutes, where the plantlife has been sufficiently obliterated as to allow great views up and down the valley.   (Avalanche chutes are only a danger in winter, when there is actually snow on the tops of the mountains.   The rest of the year, they are scenic little meadows, inviting one to take out a camera and enjoy the temporary absence of trees.)   However, in Fiordland, due to the steepness of the hills, the avalanches are a little different.   In winter, when snow from the summits avalanches down the mountain, the avalanches will hit the top edge of these vertical cliffs.   At this point, the falling snow can trap air underneath it, almost like a parachute.   When the avalanche hits the valley floor, the weight of the snow crushes into that trapped pocket of air, and the pressure causes the snow to explode outward.  This means that the tree-free areas at the bottom of these chutes can be pretty large, and they show up at very regular intervals.   The DOC has mapped something like 56 known avalanche paths that intersect the Milford Track, which is one reason why the trail more or less shuts down during the winter months.

Avalanche clearing in the Clinton valley.

            Towards the end of the second day of hiking, the track begins winding uphill through a birch forest, ending at Mintaro Hut.   We were up at 6:30 the next morning, ready for the hardest, and most rewarding day of the hike – walking out of the Clinton Valley, over the Mackinnon Pass, and into the Arthur Valley on the other side.   The weather was cold, windy, and misty, with the clouds breaking apart at intervals to give us glimpses of the surrounding mountains.   About twenty minutes out from the hut, the trail began switchbacking up the side of the hill, aiming for a low saddle between two 1800 meter summits – Mount Hart on the left, and the curiously named Mount Balloon on the right.   As we got higher, the wind became more intense, whipping the clouds up and over the pass we were trying to get to.   We stopped shortly before the ridge to put on more layers.    

  

Cloud approaching the Mackinnon Pass

           A few hours after leaving Mintaro Hut, we reached the saddle, and the large memorial cairn to Quinton Mackinnon.   Mackinnon, along with Donald Sutherland, were the first Europeans to cross the pass, confirming that there was a traversable route between Te Anau and Milford Sound.   At the time, Milford Sound was thought to have the makings of an important commercial port on the West Coast (which, with a half million visitors a year, it is - though perhaps not in the way the original surveyors had intended).   

Mackinnon memorial cairn, on Mackinnon Pass

            From the cairn, the track follows the ridge for another twenty minutes to a shelter at the side of Mount Balloon.   Along the ridge, a thick layer of hoarfrost was covering every blade of grass, almost like snow.   The mist was blowing around so much that the view from the trail seemed to change every few minutes depending on what the clouds were choosing to reveal at any given moment.     We all crammed into the shelter, gobbling snacks and warming up.   From the back of the shelter, it’s possible to look down the length of the Clinton Valley, which we had hiked over the previous two days.   The shelter’s long-drop toilet has bee built to take advantage of this scenery (it’s referred to as the ‘loo with a view’), although today frost had totally obscured the view from the window.

Hoarfrost coating the grass on Mackinnon Pass

            Shortly thereafter, we left the shelter, continuing down the other side of the ridge, and briefly escaping the wind as the trail sidled along below Mount Balloon.   The trail continued along the bottom of the Arthur valley headwall, eventually dropping back below treeline, following Moraine Creek and Roaring Burn further into the Arthur Valley.   

Sidling downhill below Mount Balloon.   The valley floor looks very far away...

            Once we were back below the treeline, the greenery gave the impression that we were close to the valley floor, although the truth of the matter was, we had lost only about half of the vertical height we needed to lose that day.   The trail along Roaring Burn was a mix of rocky trail, and boardwalks and stairs, showing off the Burn’s many small waterfalls.   

            When we finally got to the Quinton shelter (opposite the guided walks’ lodge; the posh accommodation thoughtfully keeps the DOC shelter stocked with tea and coffee) it was later in the day than we had planned, so we quickly slurped some tea, and dropped our packs off at the shelter for a blitzkrieg hike up a side trail to Sutherland Falls.   

            According to the hut rangers, Sutherland Falls is one of the main reasons why tramping on the Milford Track ever became a tourist activity in the first place.   (And the Milford track is still mainly a tourist activity – out of our group of forty, we had only one New Zealand resident.)   When Sutherland and Mackay first discovered the falls, they estimated its height at something around 4,000 feet, which would easily make it the highest waterfall anywhere in the world.   This staggeringly high waterfall was one of the reasons why people were first interested in hiking into the Arthur valley in the first place.   Unfortunately, Sutherland and company got their maths woefully wrong; the waterfall is only 580 meters (1500 or so feet), making it the world’s fifth-highest waterfall.   Despite this downgrading of its height status, people were still interested in coming out on the track, even before the Milford road had been built, meaning that the once you got to Milford, you had to turn around and hike back to Te Anau.

Approaching Sutherland Falls

            As we got closer, the trail approaches the falls in such as way that as we rounded the last bend, the view ahead sort of framed the falls, so that it looked like we were walking directly into a category 5 storm.   With the wind and the water, the falls had a significant spray zone.   We had been warned to bring rain jackets, and we had passed some dripping wet hikers who had walked behind the falls, or tried to.   (The DOC does not officially encourage hikers to do this.   The hut rangers seem to be of the opinion that since some hikers will try anyway, they might as well tell us the safest way to get back there.)   The Aussie ladies and I took some photos, and then hurried back down to Quintin shelter, to pick up our backpacks, and tackle the last four kilometers of trail to our third and final hut.

Wet and wild: with the Aussie ladies at Sutherland Falls

            Dumpling Hut is named for the adjacent Dumpling Hill, which bears very little resemblance to a dumpling; whoever named it had probably been out in the bush long enough that they were seriously fantasizing about food.   The final day of the track was long but flat, following the Arthur River towards Lake Ada, and Milford Sound.   The trail also passed a few interesting features – MacKay falls, which would probably have looked more impressive had we not seen Sutherland Falls the day before, and Bell Rock.   Bell Rock is a large, hollowed out boulder that in a previous life had been situated underneath the waterfall, before a rockfall jostled it out of the falls, and tipped it upside down .   It’s possible to duck under the lip of the rock and peer upwards with a head torch at the large pyramid-shaped hollow that the water gouged out.   

            A few kilometers past Bell Rock, we passed a section of rock cutting, where a 300 meter section of trail was carved out from the cliff face over a two-year period starting in 1896.   Prior to this, hikers had to be transported over part of Lake Ada by boat.   We were told that some of the rock cutting work crew had carved their names into the cliff, but after a century, the names must be pretty weathered; none of us spotted any carvings.    

Swingbridge in the Arthur Valley

            From there, we continued down the Arthur River, ending up at Sandfly Point shortly before the boat arrived to take us across the sound to Milford itself.   The trail marker at the end of the track is decorated by pairs of worn-out hiking boots –I noticed the sole of one of the boots was attached to its leathers with zip-ties.   We boarded the boat, chugged across Deepwater Basin to Milford Sound, and arrived at the Milford ferry terminal.   We disembarked, wet and smelly, amidst the crowds of day-tripping tourists  up from Queenstown, most of whom seemed to be in Milford only long enough to move from their scenic coach tours to their scenic boat tours and back again.   I said goodbye to my Australian hiking buddies, who were heading back to Te Anau that night, and walked another 1.5 kilometers from the boat terminal to the Milford Lodge hostel, where I stayed for the next two nights.   

Checking out the boots at the end of the Milford Track

            The next day, I joined a 7am sea kayak tour heading out to explore Milford Sound.   The weather was misty and intermittently raining, and the wind picked up as we worked out way further to the mouth of the sound.   Our guide Mark explained that although these trips are billed as paddling the length of Milford Sound out to the Tasman Sea, the trips have about a 50% chance of actually getting there, mostly due to winds picking up at the mouth of the sound.   This was the case on this trip as well, and after fighting our way into a headwind for a few kilometers, we pulled up on a handy beach, took a snack break and enjoyed the view.   As a bonus, a pair of dolphins swam by the beach shortly after we pulled up, giving us brief glimpses of their little curlicued dorsal fins.   

            As we left the beach, Mark decided to cross over to the other side of the sound, and work our way back towards the harbor until it was time for our water taxi to pick us up.   Crossing the sound in a twenty-knot wind was a little hairy – the waves weren’t huge, but there were plenty of whitecaps.   Fortunately, we were in Necky Amaruks, which are kind of like the Chevy Suburbans of tandem sea kayaks.   They’re huge, heavy, and it takes a lot of gas to get them going, but they are also big and sturdy enough to plow through many potential hazards with impunity.   Unfortunately, they’re built to be touring kayaks – they’re meant to be paddled with a load of gear in the hatches.   On day trips, the kayaks are so lightly loaded that the boat will be sitting much higher in the water than it was designed to be, and can catch the wind a lot more.   As was the case on this trip.  (On windy days, I’ve been known to put rocks in the hatches of my clients’ boats to try and get them to balance correctly.)   Once we got to the far side of the fiord, we had the wind at our backs, which made for a much easier time.   Overall, I got the impression that the sea kayak guides in Milford had a slightly more accepting view of the possibility of capsizes than the guides in Alaska, which probably has something to do with their much warmer water temperatures.    

            Back at Milford Lodge that night, I got a couple of unexpected birthday presents.   My Australian friends called the hostel to wish me a happy birthday, and the hostel manager in turn gave me a free glass of wine.   Plus, a friend from the Iceberg Lodge emailed me pictures from our snow-shoveling crew’s recent visit out to the lagoon.   The site seems to be weathering the winter just fine, although most of our buildings are buried in snow up to the rafters.  

            The next day, I caught a bus back to Te Anau, where I am currently resting and giving lots of TLC to my left knee, which decided to go on strike after hiking for four days and then being shoved into a kayak cockpit for six hours.   Unfortunately, this means I’ve had to alter my plans for hiking the Kepler Track – I will still be hiking it, but only a very small section.   Frankly, its not worth it to carry weight for several days with an injury, even if it’s a comparatively minor one, as I don’t want to risk doing anything that would jeopardize my ability to work this coming summer.   I am really looking forward to getting back to Alaska, and to the Lodge, but I also know that the beginning of the season – with all of the gear carrying, safety training, boat cleaning, show shoveling, trail maintaining, cabin cleaning, staff reunioning, and bonfire partying  - is going to bring with it a whole new set of bumps and bruises, as it does every year.

Mount Cook

            Like many things that begin in Haast, my four day trip to Mount Cook began in the rain, and the rain was heavy even by West Coast standards.    The highway out of Haast starts out by following the Haast River upstream for nearly fifty kilometers.    When I left the township, it wasn’t actually raining, although the skies looked pretty dark.   Halfway along the Haast river, I noticed that I was seeing waterfalls on the mountains that I had never seen before.   This was my first indication that I was going to be in for a wet drive.   I drove into the deluge about ten minutes later.   The waterfalls continued to be abundant and spectacular.   On one particular section of cliff, there were six or seven small waterfalls plunging down into the drainage ditch next to the road.   It almost looked as though someone farther up the hill had turned on a line of fire hydrants and aimed them all at the highway.   In deference to the Nissan’s bald tires, I was creeping along through the standing water at about 30 kph.   Fortunately, the rain started to slacken off as I started up through the Haast Pass itself, and although it was still raining hard, I was no longer quite so afraid of hydroplaning into a ditch.

            At the top of the pass, I met the first cyclists.   There were apparently at least two different escorted cycling tours on the highway, both of which had unerringly picked the rainiest day of the month of March to cycle up and over the 1500 foot Haast Pass.   There were probably close to forty cyclists on the road, all doggedly pedaling uphill in the rain at 5 or 6 kilometers an hour.   Highway 6 being what it is, there were very few safe places on the road to pass.   This did not prevent some cars from passing anyway – my refusal to do so unless I had a clear view of the oncoming traffic occasionally earned me an angry line of campervans lining up behind my rear bumper.    I also watched a red coupe nearly run over two cyclists in front of me.   The coupe passed my car, and kept accelerating as he swung back into the proper lane - only to come to a screeching halt in front of me when he saw the bikes I’d been following.   I physically do not know how the coupe avoided running them over – my best guess is that some guardian angel must have temporarily lengthened the road to give the coupe the braking distance it needed to stop.   I’ve heard cyclists complain that New Zealand drivers are criminally reckless about passing bikes, but even from within the comparative safety of an actual car, the drive was terrifying.   I didn’t want to stop, however, because I knew I would only have to re-pass the same bikes all over again, and I figured that sooner or later, I would catch up to the front of the pack.   That happened, but not until Makarora, when it got flat enough that it was actually possible to pass the bikes without risking death in the process.    I am ready to write to the New Zealand highways commission and suggest that they put in a bike lane over the Haast Pass – it would be far safer, and, one would assume, much less terrifying for the cyclists.

            After running through the cyclist/campervan Southern Alps slalom course, I stopped for lunch in Wanaka, and continued the drive through the MacKenzie country, and up Highway 8 towards Mount Cook village.   I was expecting more mountain driving on the way to Mount Cook, but the road was surprisingly, and welcomingly open, mostly due to the engineering work done by the Tasman Glacier during the last ice age.   The road to the town went through a classic, Yosemite-like glacier valley, with steep, high mountains, and a big, flat, U-shaped floor.   Basically, a few thousand years ago, the advancing glacier acted as a big bulldozer, flattening out the valley floor, and whittling away at the sides of the adjoining mountains.   When the glacier retreated, it left behind a big, broad, steep-sided valley that leads up almost to the foot of New Zealand’s highest mountain.

            I got to the village around 5:30, and checked into my hostel.   Just as I arrived, two girls were getting ready to go on a hike out to a local viewpoint.   Although I wasn’t quite clear on where they were going, I grabbed my boots, shoved a few hiking essentials into my backpack, and joined them.   We followed a footpath out of the village, past a public campground, and up into the jumbled collection of low hills that make up an old moraine from the Muller Glacier.   The entire walk was in the shadow of Mount Sefton, which is the huge, glacier-studded mountain that looms over the village.   About an hour later, we got out to Kea Point, which looks out over Lake Muller, at the foot of Mount Sefton.   Mount Cook, also known as Aoraki, was jutting up like a spire further back in the valley.  It looked stunning, and the sunlight out of the west was lighting up the snow on the summit well after everything else in the valley was in shadow.   

Kea Point, looking towards Mount Sefton

            At this point, it was 6:45pm, and I thought we had reached the end of our walk.    The girls said that they were going to continue on to the Hooker Valley track, to try and get to the end of the track to take pictures of the mountain at sunset, which would be at 8pm.   I felt obliged to point out the obvious fact that if they planned on taking pictures from the end of the track at sunset, they would then be walking back the entire length of the trail in the dark.   The girls weren’t deterred, and said they would just walk fast.   They didn’t have a flashlight, or any light source other than the screens on their cell phones and cameras.  I opted out, saying that I hadn’t eaten dinner yet, which was true, but  mostly I felt like there was a distinct possibility of this turning into the sort of hike that involves the New Zealand Mountain Rescue Association.   I walked with them as far as the Alpine Memorial, gave them my flashlight, and went back to the hostel. 

            I figured they would be back by 10pm; they actually got back about fifteen minutes before that, after hiking in the dark for an hour and a half.    The French girl thanked me repeatedly for lending them a flashlight; it sounded like they had a bit of a scary time getting back.   Her English was not very good; she kept talking about there being someone following them on the trail, and that he’d frightened them.   It didn’t sound like she was talking about a hiker, but I never was able to get the full story.    (Wouldn’t the presence of another person on a dark, deserted trail be comforting?   Have the sasquatch moved into Mount Cook National Park?)   The French girl left on a bus early the next morning, which was one reason why she was so keen to hike the Hooker track that evening, as she wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to go out there.

            I went out the next morning to hike Hooker Valley Track - the same trail that the girls had been on the night before.   Now having been out there myself, I sort of understand why the girls were willing to disregard common sense in order to hike this particular trail.   The Hooker Valley is possibly one of the best day hikes I have ever been on, and it isn’t even that hard of a track.   I’ve been on plenty of hikes in Alaska where there are great views and scenery – towering mountains, blue-grey glaciers, and alpine lakes - but generally, you have climb uphill for a few hours and a couple thousand feet in order to enjoy these views.   On this trail, the total elevation gain is only a few hundred feet, and you’re seeing glaciers before you even start walking.   As in, you can see glaciers from the carpark.   There aren’t many hiking trails that can make that claim.   The trail also crosses the Hooker and Muller rivers on swingbridges, which give great views of the rivers below.   The whole of the Hooker valley is very open, meaning that you’re looking at Mount Sefton and Aoraki for basically the whole hike.   Of course, it helped that the weather on this particular day was great, sunny and warm, with no clouds to speak of, so I could see all the way to the summits.   I imagine the hike would be slightly less spectacular with low cloud cover - but you’d still see a lot of glaciers and lakes.   As it is, being able to hike this trail on a perfect weather day is possible the single best thing I have done on this entire New Zealand adventure.

Swingbridge crossing the Muller outflow stream, with Muller Glacier's terminal lake in the background

            On the trail ahead of me was a small mob of schoolkids, who were up from a New Zealand school on a four-day extended field trip.   Every so often, I would pass a clump of kids rummaging around in the greenery to one side of the trail with clipboards and field guides in hand.   A few of the adult chaperones tried to apologize that the kids were walking slow; I just told them that I was in no hurry.   I couldn’t think of a short way to explain that they were my personal heroes of the day for bringing kids out to such an amazing place as part of a field trip.   My elementary school certainly wasn’t that cool.

Best.  Field Trip.  Ever.

            The Hooker Valley track ended at a terminus lake in front of the Hooker glacier.   Compared to the hanging glaciers on the mountains themselves, the Hooker Glacier was so covered with rubble from its own moraine that the ice was visible only as a faint blue line at the far end of the lake.   The lake itself was the thick, grey color of chocolate milk, courtesy all of the silt and sediment that the Hooker Glacier is grinding up and carrying downhill.   Most of these terminal lakes (there are three in the Mount Cook area) have formed within the past century, as the glaciers have retreated further and further into the mountains.   I learned on this trip that the formation of these lakes is actually changing the topography of the glacier’s outflow streams.   When an outflow stream flows directly from the front of the glacier itself, it carries with it enough silt to continually build up its own streambed.   Basically, there is so much silt and sediment entering the stream that the stream never erodes a deep channel, like most rivers do.   But now that so many of the Mount Cook National Park glaciers have suddenly developed lakes at their terminus, the lakes are acting as a giant settling pond for all of the silt and debris that would otherwise be carried further downstream.   So, the outflow streams, which now depart from the far side of the lake, have much less sediment in them than compared to a century ago.   And without this extra silt, the streams don’t have enough sediment to keep rebuilding up their own streambeds.   So, the rivers and streams downstream of the glacier are beginning to carve out proper channels for the first time since the last ice age.   This has the potential to dramatically change the look of the big broad, flat valley over the next few centuries, as the river channels get deeper and deeper over time.   New Zealand is a pretty awesome country for anyone even mildly interested in geology, because a lot of the landform-shaping processes happen in a short enough time span that you can see the differences just by looking at old photographs.

Hooker Glacier's terminal lake, with Aoraki/Mount Cook on the left.   The chocolate color of the water is from silt and other suspended debris.   The glacier's terminal face is faintly visible at the back of the lake.

               One very dramatic example of landform-shaping change has to do with Mount Cook itself, New Zealand’s highest mountain.   Mount Cook has always been New Zealand’s highest mountain, but the mountain currently is about thirty feet shorter than it was when it was first climbed in 1894.   In 1991, the summit of Mount Cook fell off.   It triggered a huge landslide involving 12 million cubic meters of rock sliding downhill for seven kilometers before coming to rest on top of the Tasman Glacier.   The event was witnessed by a group of climbers, who watched the entire landslide from the comparative safety of a hut on the mountain’s east face.   (The climbers would have been directly in the debris path at the time the landslide happened but for the fact that they had inadvertently slept through their alarm.)   The landslide wasn’t triggered by an earthquake (though the impact of the landslide slamming into the valley floor was picked up by seismographs in Twizel, 70 kilometers away), nor had there been heavy rain, strong winds, snow slides, or anything else that could feasibly have triggered such a massive event on the mountain.   Later inspection of the mountain showed that the entire summit of Mount Cook is very unstable; it’s possible that there could be another such landslide on the mountain at any time.

            The end of the Hooker Valley track gives a great view of how steep Mount Cook actually is – the western side of the mountain seems to drop down to the surface of the glacier in one long, near-vertical rock face.   I ate my lunch at the lake, and meandered back along the track to the trailhead.   On reaching the campground, I decided to take a different route back to the village, which turned out to be a bad idea.   The valley that Mount Cook village sits in is so flat, and wide, and treeless that it makes it difficult to judge distances.   It’s possible to hike towards the village for 45 minutes, and not feel like you are getting any closer to your destination.   The valley itself is interesting to look at, but not that interesting to walk through  – there’s only tall, yellow grass, interspersed with glacial erratics - giant boulders that were carried downhill by the glacier a few thousand years ago, dropped in the valley as the ice melted from under them, and remain there to this day because very few other natural processes have the ability to move rocks that big.   But mostly, the valley floor is wide, and flat, and grassy.   As in, you could photoshop a zebra into your vacation photos, and it would not look terribly out of place.

            I had planned to hike up to the Red Tarns in the afternoon, but I ended up getting slightly lost trying to find where the trail actually started.   Instead, I hiked the trail I did find, which meandered through a birch forest on the lower slopes of the mountain immediately behind the village.   By the time I found the Red Tarns trailhead, my legs were not up to hiking the whole length – the trail is straight up, and whoever built it apparently had a moral aversion to switchbacks – so I stopped about halfway.   Although I never saw the tarns themselves, I got far enough past the tree line to be able to look back across the village, and the huge valley that encompasses it.

            Back at the youth hostel, I watched The Return of the King with a few other travelers, which was cool both because it is a great movie, and also because the day before I had driven through the general area where most of the Pelennor Field battle scenes had been shot.   (They still apparently offer tours of the Twizel-area farm that hosted the shoot, where you, too, can don plastic sword and shield and run screaming downhill to do battle with CGI’ed Nazgul.)

            The next day, I dithered over whether I wanted to pay $150 to go on a guided kayaking trip of Tasman Glacier’s iceberg-filled terminus lake, or just drive out there myself and hike near the lake for free.   I decided that going out on a kayaking tour of an iceberg-filled glacier terminus lake was likely going to feel too much like work, since this is basically the job description for what I do in Alaska.   Also, part of the reason for living in a foreign country for six months is to do things that I can’t actually do back home.   I decided to just go and hike on my own, which turned out to be a good call.   Partly because Tasman Glacier’s icebergs were not all that the kayaking company’s promotional material had made them out to be.   There are not very many of them, and they are not that big.   Mostly, the icebergs looked a little sad, sitting all morose and silt-covered as they melted their way into oblivion.   Of course, since it’s the end of the summer here, there is probably less ice in the lake right now than at other times of the year; the lake probably looks more dramatic in spring.   I think I have turned into a glacier lake snob; the Iceberg Lodge’s lagoon has ruined me for all other glacier terminus lakes.   

Tasman Glacier's terminal lake.   Beautiful, but somewhat lacking in icebergs.

            The second reason I was glad I didn’t kayak was that by 10:00am the wind had picked up noticeably.   By noon, it was gusting at around 50 knots – not strong enough to blow you off your feet, but strong enough that you had to factor the wind gusts into account in order to walk around.   In those conditions, I doubt anyone was running kayaking trips, (and if they did, the trips would have sucked – paddling into a headwind that strong is never fun).   Aside from the lack of icebergs, the lake itself was pretty cool, mostly because the lake is bordered on three sides by enormous moraine walls – cliffs of jumbled rock several hundred feet high.   Also, the moraine is recent enough that there aren’t any plants growing on it, giving Tasman the surface-of-the-moon quality that one finds in recently retreated glaciers.   

            Unfortunately, the strong wind wasn’t local to the glaciers; by the time I got back to the main Mt Cook road, I could see a line of clouds being pushed over the summit ridge of Mount Sefton.   The wind continued for the entire drive south to Wanaka, shoving the Nissan back and forth across its lane with alarming intensity.  Every time I got out of the car, I expected the wind to be worse than it was, just based on how things felt inside the car.   In fact, it wasn’t a very substantial wind,  but neither is the Nissan a very substantial car.   The next day in Wanaka, the wind was still blowing hard, but I was able to pick up a couple of hitchhikers for ballast.   Between them and their camping gear, I estimate we added around 400 pounds in weight to the car.   I dropped them off in Haast township, correctly interpreted the look of dismay on their faces at how small Haast township actually is, and offered to take them another three kilometers down the road to Haast Junction.   They were going to try and catch a ride up to Fox or Franz Josef, the closest towns to the north of us.   Another indication that very few people want to stay in Haast any longer than it takes to buy a coffee and top up their petrol.

Hooker Valley Track

Hiking in Franz Josef

            In deference to the abysmal weather forecast, I did not go backpacking during my most recent days off.   Instead, I drove up to the glacier town of Franz Josef, and managed to find a trail that kicked my ass just as effectively as backpacking would have.    I hiked up to Roberts Point, which is a viewpoint above Franz Josef glacier, a round trip of 12.3 kilometers, with 600 meters of elevation gain.  I have discovered in the course of my time in New Zealand, that trails in this country come in two different varieties – the scrupulously maintained, and the feral.   Figuring out how hard a given hike is going to be has less to do with figuring out the mileage and elevation gain than it does with figuring out where your trail sits on the domesticated/feral sliding scale.   I first discovered this when I went hiking along the Moeraki River in January, along a trail which was in such bad shape that, had it been a trail in the US, hiking guides would not consider it an actual maintained trail.   I have also discovered that mainstream tourist guidebooks, such as Lonely Planet, are not always a good indication of difficulty.   Any time my Lonely Planet guide says ‘check track conditions before starting out’, it basically means ‘abandon all hope, all ye who hike through here’.   

            The Roberts Point trail was pretty feral, although not as bad as the Moeraki trail, since most of the rivers were actually bridged.   With this trail, the main problem was that the places where landslides or floods have washed out the trail, there hasn’t been much effort into rebuilding or rerouting the path.   The first half of the trail climbed up and down the side of the hill to the north side of the Franz Josef glacier’s outflow stream.   I would climb up and up, and then the trail would drop right back to the riverbed to get around a cliff or some other obstruction.   In one place, the DOC had bolted a scaffold made of pressure-treated wood and airplane cable to the side of a cliff.    So, there were definite indications that before the big tourism slump, this trail had received some serious attention – but there doesn’t seem to be the budget or manpower to maintain it very much.   I did note that sometime in the last two weeks someone had come through with a weed whacker, because there were lopped off ferns all over the place.   

            About halfway along the trail, the route started seriously climbing the hill, and I realized that the ups and downs earlier were really just warm-ups.   A lot of the trail was on bare rock, liberally covered with striation marks from when the glacier was covering this area, a half-century or so earlier.   At the top of the climb, incongruously enough, was a park bench.   I’m guessing the bench got put here because the terrain is open enough that someone could bring it in with a helicopter.   Sitting on the bench, I could see all the way back to the car park (which did not look far enough away considering how much work it took to get up the hill), and the little ant trail of tourists going back and forth along the glacier access trail.    

            Since the area near the park bench is so open, almost like an alpine meadow, it gives the impression that you’re near the top of the whatever-it-is you’re hiking towards.   But, like the fake-out climbs at the start of the trail, this is actually not the case.   It turned out, Roberts Point was a further hour and a half away.   And the condition of the route got worse in a hurry.   As soon as I left the meadow, the trail diverted up a  series of rock chutes, which were wet, shady, and infrequently-traveled enough to allow for a for a light coating of moss to grow on all of the rocks.  The rocks were very slippery, but I kept going, sure that at any moment I would get out of the chute and see the much-acclaimed Roberts Point glacier view.

            Thirty minutes into this, I passed an American woman, who told me it would be another thirty minutes to the top.   I believed her.   Unfortunately, I did not take into account my mother’s rule of thumb for judging the accuracy of time estimates provided by other hikers, which is, for every visible bulging muscle in the hiker’s thighs, add another thirty minutes to whatever time they’ve told you.   I pressed on over the slippery rocks, and crossed two unbridged creeks.   Twenty minutes later, I met a German couple coming the other way, who were hiking (‘down-climbing’ might be a more accurate term) down another long rock chute.   They already looked very tired from the hike, and were nearly sliding down the chute, mostly because they didn’t seem able to summon up the energy to find dry footholds and check them before committing their full weight.   I waited at the bottom of the chute, because the Germans were sliding so often that I felt it was in my best interest to not be directly below them, just in case they fell.   When they got to the bottom, the couple told me that it would be another thirty minutes to the top.

            Wondering if I had fallen into some New Zealand rock-chute time warp, I continued up the trail.   After passing a few more bluffs that looked like the summit but weren’t, I finally reached the top, five minutes before my get-down-before-dusk turnaround time.   There was a great view of the glacier, although this particular day most of the higher elevations were hidden by clouds.   I could see the long line of Franz Josef’s impressively thick medial moraine – the rock and debris that the glacier is carrying down with it, to deposit in the valley below, like a slow-motion conveyer belt.   I could also see the tiny figures of the guided glacier-walking tours, the dots appearing and disappearing as the hikers made their way around the cliffs and crevasses.   I didn’t stay very long at the viewpoint, as it was getting late, and I didn’t like the idea of being the last person on that trail, when I had to down-climb all of that slick rock that had nearly taken out the German couple.   I got down the slick rock without incident, only to fall while climbing into a gully where a flood had taken out a forty-foot section of trail.   I tried to lower myself down using a tree root, only to discover that I couldn’t support my own weight with my arm at that particular angle.   I ended up at the bottom of the gully - just by a more direct route that I had planned.   I got back to the groomed trails near the entrance area just as it started to rain.   

Franz Josef Glacier from Roberts Point.  The thickness of the moraine is very noticeable from this angle.

            At the hostel that night, I watched an episode of BBCs Frozen Planet, watching a pale blue David Attenborough huffing his way around the north pole and the Antarctic ice sheet.   I think it says something about the tourism segment that visits New Zealand that a documentary on ice would attract mosh-pit-like crowds in the backpacker hostel’s TV room.   

            The next day, the weather was no better, so I did a shorter hike out to the face of Franz Josef glacier and back.  This trail, unlike Roberts Point, is dead flat, well-groomed, and generally overrun with tourists.   I am happy to report that the pouring rain did not seem to deter even the least well-equipped of the glacier sightseers.  There were a lot of people wearing garbage-bag-like disposable ponchos, plus a lot of people taking advantage of the enormous picnic umbrellas that the ritzier Franz Josef hotels provide for their guests.   The problem with these umbrellas is that in the wind they’re liable to take off in unexpected directions, and also don’t offer much protection for the rain being blown sideways.   Since the cold air over the glacier actually its own wind, there is sideways rain on the access trail pretty much all of the time.   One woman was holding the umbrella out in front of her, speed-walking past her fellow tourists in the manner of a crusader with a battering ram.   A six-year-old boy was wearing an adult-sized red rain poncho, the hem of which was dangling cape-like around his ankles, making him look like some sort of Gore-tex superman.   He seemed far less interested in looking at the glacier than in jumping in all the puddles along the trail.  There was also the usual percentage of idiots wandering off trail to get closer to the ice, or to take photos of family members standing under the unstable rock cliffs.

The glacier access trail at Franz Josef.  

            Before driving back to Haast, I replaced a windshield wiper on the Nissan, which had suffered from the attentions of the township’s keas.   The drive back to Haast took about an hour longer that it should have, mostly due to the fact that the Nissan has a distressing tendency to pull to the left when driving through puddles at anything over 65kph.   I think this is connected to the fact that the left front tire has no tread left on the outside edge.   I was hoping that this issue would be addressed when the car had its warrant of fitness inspection done last month.   (My boss, who owns the Nissan, assures me that the tire tread is checked with calipers, though I feel that calipers become unnecessary when the outside edge of the tire is smooth to the touch…)   Unfortunately, the tires all passed; to me the only explanation is that they weren’t checked.    It makes me wonder if there are any other incipient mechanical problems that the WOF guy didn’t check.

            Also, if I’m going to be in a car accident in New Zealand, I now know where it is most likely to take place.   There is a particular 25kph curve between Franz Josef and Fox Glacier – I have driven this curve from the south twice now, and have had a near accident each time.   Not my fault, either time.    The first time was when the car in front of me (whom I’ll call ‘the idiot’) decided to pass the car in front of him – as all three of us were heading into a 90 degree blind curve.    Previously, I had not thought it was possible to T-bone a car that is travelling in the same lane as you are, but this is basically what the idiot nearly did.   The idiot only avoided an accident by slamming on the brakes and swerving back into the left lane, so fast I could see his passenger’s head whipping back and forth like those bobble-head toys people used to mount on their dashboards.   

            This trip, at the same 25kph curve, I was halfway through the curve, and nearly wrapped the Nissan around a tree to avoid an oncoming white car who had drifted into my lane.   I’m always a little nervous about curves or hills where I can’t see in front of me, mostly because I have this gut-level feeling that some giant campervan is going to come around the corner and be in my lane.   Mostly, I think this is due to the fact that even though I’ve gotten used to driving on the left, there is still some part of me that feels that this is a very bad thing to do.  Somewhere in the world, there is oncoming traffic, and the oncoming traffic will be in the left lane.   The fact that this left-lane oncoming traffic isn’t on even on this continent doesn’t seem to register with my hindbrain.   Also, there was a fatal head-on collision just north of Haast a few weeks after I arrived.   The entire highway was shut down for several hours while the police and emergency services were at the scene.   The road opened shortly before 10pm.   I know this because at 10:15pm, half a dozen moderately traumatized motorists showed up at the motel looking for  a place to stay.   The event made an impression.

            I am still looking for a weather window that coincides with my days off to do another hut-to hut hiking trip, possibly over the Haast-Paringa cattle trail (near the Moeraki trail, but apparently better maintained) or the Copland track, whose first hut is strategically located next to a natural hot spring.   Part of this is an effort to get in shape for the tracks I will be tackling next month in Fiordland – the Milford and Kepler tracks, both in the Te Anau area.   I’ll be finishing the Milford Track the day before my birthday, which I think will be a fine way to wrap up my 27^th year.