Mount Cook

After battling cold sores and canker sores for a record 3 weeks, my left eye mysteriously swelled half shut for a few more days. The joys of eating on the road....

We couchsurfed with a guy who ran his local farmers market, worked at an awesome recycling/second-hand non-profit outfit, and was nearly self-suficient with his awesome veggie garden and what he was able to trade for. And on only a 1/4 acre of property in town. We had many a fruitful discussion on self-sufficiency, community, and the like.

Did some more housekeeping too, in order to bank a few nights of free accommodation, the lowlight of which was watching a couple of fellow countrymen, calling themselves "Team Canada" playing strip poker, and the highlight of which was this sunset...

And then off we went, to Mount Cook village whose namesake is the highest in the country, over 3700m. For an altitude of 700m and a paved road, the scenery was astounding...

We stayed with a guy who'd couchsurfed with us in the Yukon, on his way home from Alaska to Colorado. He was living in staff housing, so we were only able to stay under the radar for so long, but managed to crank out some solid hiking. We left in less-than-ideal weather to beat the crowds, but spent an interesting 10 minutes covering our eyes and breathing through our shirts as clouds of silt were blown up from the glaciers moraine walls. The small 3-bunk hut fit us perfectly. Because it's a fairly popular area and there's some pretty gnarly terrain...

.... there's a radio in each hut. Listening to the radio check-in each night feels pretty romantic. The next morning, we got called specifically to keep an eye our for a missing party, who were literally stumbling past our hut as I got the call. The radio is in the outhouse, so you can picture the hilarity, so you can picture the awkwardness as I summoned the two exhausted Australians into the shitter for an impromtu radio pow-wow. They'd tried an 18hr undertaking in a single day, without extra food or overnight gear.

They're starting to use these emergency locator beacons whose technology the government has borrowed from the U.S. military. You can buy or rent them, and if you get stuck and would rather pay with your wallet than your life, you press the button and they can pinpoint your location to within 2m. And the helicopters they send out have some sort of night-vision goggles that can spot a candle-flame 15km away. If it's determined that you did nothing wrong and were simply the victim of unexpected weather, for example, you don't have to pay at all. Of course, the problem then arises that people will substitute the beacons for proper knowledge or gear...

North face of Mount Cook. True summit just out of sight. Many a glacier calving and small avalanches did we see and hear tumbling throughout the day.

The Tasman Glacier behind Amy, below, is the longest in the country at 27km, but is receding as fast as any other. It's lower reaches, as you can see behind Amy here, are completely covered in rock, the cause for which still confuses me.

We'd wanted to cross the glacier (flat and crevasse-free), but the river on the other side was too high to cross, so we'll leave that for another visit.

We'd lucked out a bit, arriving for the first good stretch of weather this season, so we decided to push our endurance and hike 4 days straight. Our second hut of the visit was perched smack dab in the middle of the second picture from the top of this post. Fantastic panorama, nobody else around and lots of falling rock and snow to listen to...

A little ways upstream of this pic I ran into a guy with a CMH shirt who'd met my dad back in the day. Small world... 

-Dan