Having little sleep that night, like a kid on christmas eve. I woke up many times asking Becky ‘Is it time to go yet?’
We made our way to the meeting point in town to get kitted up with gortex jackets, boots, hats and gloves, and crampons, and catch the bus up to the terminal of the glacier, actually although it looked like we’d been dropped off right there, it took us another hour to walk to the head, once there, we donned on our crampons and listened carefully to what our guide, Sam, had to say.
The ice glacier moves, at the terminal (where it stops) about a metre a day, even faster further up where the valley closes in. Everyday new streams and holes appear, so the guides never have a clear idea of the route for the day.
As we climbed up on the ice we started to get our footing and felt (at least i did) surprisingly stable. We spent the next few hours wandring about the natural icy maze, stopping every now and again for Sam to wander up a little gully before turning back, annoucing ‘This way guys’ and walking in the other direction. Or cutting steps into the ice for us to climb, keen for someone else to want to try so he would get a rest.
We finally, after what seemed like hours of going up and down, sat down for lunch, on our rucksacks so we didn’t get numb bums, and ate our ‘one square meal’ (if you ever see them, dont try them) before turning up twards a large crevasse and finally trying to make our way back down the way we came up, some of the steps cut into the ice already gone!
Again, as with lots of our trips, i’m not going to try to describe how amazing it was, so look at the photos!
We’re off to Wanaka now to go find a river to raft down!
Thats 365 (ish) nights of use! Bought in 2000. Its first birthday was spent on a beach during a kayaking tour of Abel Tasman National Park.
Its been up mountains, sat on wind blown scenery, dug in on beaches during wintry offshore winds, crammed with too many people during near death experiences (thats 5! you try it), and just had a fab time during the calm of family camp sites.
Its been sewn, patched, resealed, re-elasticized, cleaned by many immigration departments, poles broken and fixed. But other than maintenance due to excessive use (and Becky)… still going strong.
So thank you Terra Nova for sheltering us from the elements, here is to another year!
We drove across from the Christchurch and the East coast to the West coast through the Southern Alps, with some (OK, all of it) amazing scenery and some hairy roads we travelled to Arthurs Pass Village (Population 50, highest settlement in NZ) where we planned to stay the night, although a lovely village and a cheap little campsite we neglected to think through our accomidation. Arthurs Pass is THE route through the mountains with the rail road one side and the main highway the other, our tent, slap in the middle.
In the morning, after a noisy night, and little sleep and a catastrophic tent faliure (we’d like to thank Terra Nova for making tents that just won’t die. our tent was as good as new by the next night), we went off the the DOC office to find out about local walks. I wanted to do Avalanche Pass, a crazy walk, a steep 1 kilometre rise over 4 hours, but with a lot of low cloud (low cloud? or high mountains?) and bags under our eyes, we decided against it, settling for a nice 3 hour hike through the valley and then another drive down to the West Coast
Photos Here : http://www.kitjunkie.org/albums/v/travelling/nz/southernalps/
