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.