Southern Lakes, Southern Alps
“Oh my god.” Must have said that about ten thousand times in the past week. We drove from Wanaka, where we had spent three beautiful days and taken a great day hike to the top of a little bump with views over the whole lake and quite a bit of Mt. Aspiring National Park, through Queenstown (which is like Mammoth Lakes Village on steroids) 45 km west to the tiny town of Glenorchy at the head of Lake Wakapitu, where the Routebourn, Caples, and Greenstone tracks all have their eastern ends. These “Southern Lakes” are all glacial lakes, some of them very deep (bottoms below sea level). They are surrounded by steep mountains in classic U-shaped glacial form, all crowned with snow and some with glaciers. Glenorchy is stunningly situated at the head of the lake, where two big rivers, the Dart and the Rees, flow into it. We stayed two nights there—wish we could have self-catered, as the one good eating place is closed for dinner except in high summer, January and February. There was a slightly strange vibe in Glenorchy, as though there was a skeleton in someone's closet that no one wanted revealed.
The beginning of those three famous hiking routes is on the west side of both the rivers I mentioned a bit north of Glenorchy. We took a long day hike near the start of the Routeburn, got our first taste of sandflies—or actually they got their first taste of us. We were in beech forest, mostly red beech. Beech trees in NZ are nothing like what we think of as beech in the No. hemisphere. Their leaves are very small mostly, the biggest about an inch long, most about ¼ -1/3 of an inch. Branches are horizontal, trunks very straight and tall. Red beech and mountain beech have huge trunks, up to 4 or 5 feet in diameter. They are not deciduous—there is only one deciduous tree native to NZ, and now I’ve forgotten its name….ribbon wood? There are five varieties of beeches, mostly growing in the west of the South Island. I have come to be very fond of them and will miss them when we leave here. I've tried to photograph innumerable ones, never feeling I've captured their grace and presence.
Our hike was on a very windy day and we saw several huge trees--100 feet tall or more, trunks four feet thick--that had fallen right smack over in the past few weeks (leaves on the fallen tree still green) so it felt a bit dicey hiking through them, hearing all this creaking and clacking as the upper branches would bang together with others. They have quite shallow root systems for such huge and heavy trees, so falling over is not an uncommon way for them to go. The oldest around seem to be around 4-500 years. Then they just get too big and fall over, if they haven’t been killed by disease or logged by then.
After Glenorchy we drove to Te Anau, the town on the lake of the same name, another huge glacial lake, which is where most people base themselves for trips into Fiordland. We were hoping to stay at Milford Lodge at Milford Sound, but it was all booked up til the end of the month. It’s the only place to stay at the Sound unless you’ve come off a guided walk on the Milford Track, in which case you spend the first night off the trail at a motel-type lodge right there at the end of the road. Only people on commercial tramps can stay there, not “freedom” walkers. Something I found interesting is that the quota for the trek is 48 commercially guided walkers and 40 independent walkers each day during the season. Commercial trips cost $1750 NZ (about $1275 US today). Seems a little out of balance to me, since most kiwis would not be able to afford the commercial trips. You have to reserve months in advance if you want to do it independently.
That night we did stay part-way to the Sound about 60K along on the Milford Road, at a place called Knob Flat in the Edlington River Valley. There’s a fellow (PC, his name is) who used to work for the DOC (Dept of Conservation—should be Conversation, these DOC people like to TALK--as a matter fact, it is a rare Kiwi we have met who isn't ready to talk your socks off), who got a concession to build some tourist units there, and they are almost new, with little kitchens and great views of the other side of the river valley, big waterfalls coming down off the mountains. The units are in a clearing, surrounded by beech forest. I love these beech forests more and more, keep taking photos but so far not succeeding in catching the elegance. (Kicking myself daily for not bringing my SLR camera, just have a little tiny Canon digital.) The red beech get very open, horizontal branch structure as they get older, look like trees in Chinese paintings, many horizontal planes with much space between, soft green lacy foliage, and those elephantine trunks. There’s an unmanned DOC info center at Knob Flat, and the only phone between Te Anau and Milford Sound. If the roads are too dangerous (icy), you can leave your car there and the bus will stop and pick you up to take you the rest of the way. That’s what the phone is for.
I saw a Morepork—NZ’s one owl, a fairly small one, about pigeon sized—just before dark that evening. It flew out from around the side of the little cabin and into a beech tree about forty yards away. Then in the night I got up to pee and I saw an owl fly up from a little wall about six feet from our window and then come back. I got the binoculars out and could sort of make out the face--it was almost full moon, a bright night. Probably the same bird I’d seen earlier. The next morning I saw my first NZ falcon—looks like a kestrel, pretty much—on a rock. It was the first time I had seen a hawk roosting anywhere. Up until then I had only seen the Australian harrier—twice as big as the NZ falcon. And it has always been in the air, often being chased by Australian magpies or gulls.
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Milford Sound, November 23
Okay, I cried. You know how the first time you drive through Zion you can’t stop saying “wow”? Well, it was a day like that. And it was raining and misty, visibility definitely poor! The last twenty miles of the Milford Road are astonishingly beautiful, awe-inspiring. The most perfect example of glacial valleys I’ve ever seen, perfectly U-shaped, thousands of feet deep, and soooo naked, rock rock rock, with water pouring off, a waterfall coming down a couple thousand feet of rock every 40 yards or so. Hanging valleys off the sides of the major cirques, huge themselves. Rivers the bluest-greenest you would ever want to see, tumbling around huge blocks of rock. Gneiss and schist mostly, I think. Then you arrive at the Sound and there is Mitre Peak in front of you, just like the photos. It was raining pretty hard but we hung around on the end of the jetty and just stared at the water and the beech forest—and the boats, boats going out constantly for tours of the Sound. We were going on a Doubtful Sound tour the next day so decided not to do a cruise on the Milford. There used to be a waterfall walk right from the end of the Sound but they’ve closed it because of landslide danger. Not much else to do at the Sound itself if you aren’t going out on a boat. They don’t have a DOC visitor center or any exhibits, just a big fancy building for the boat tour operators and a café and bar. (The interaction between government and commercial businesses seems very different—DOC offices are full of brochures for the various guiding and activity companies, motels, etc. No sense of “official” vs. “promotional”. It takes some getting used to. At first I had the sense the gov’t was endorsing these particular operations, but they don’t discriminate, everyone with a little tour bus can get their brochures in the slots.) We had coffee (two flat whites), hung around hoping for a break in the rain so we could see a bit more, and then drove back to Te Anau. The return drive was just as amazing, all those waterfalls again, all that rock. It is such a place.
From three on Thursday afternoon until 4pm Friday we were in Fiordland National Park and it was the first 24 hours since arriving in NZ in which I have not seen thousands of sheep. Really!
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Doubtful Sound, November 24
More tears. Even just recalling the day, tears start to come. I am so grateful these places exist, so grateful to be able to see them. It makes me deeply happy to know they are here. I must have taken a hundred photos on the trip to Doubtful, but none of them captured the mysterious, primordial beauty of it. More perfect U-shaped glacial valleys, more exquisite beech forests clinging to the steep mountainsides, more snow hanging over the whole. The water of the sound looks black because there is so much fresh water flowing into the sound that it forms a layer 30 meters thick on top of the seawater, and it doesn’t reflect the light the way the seawater does, it is brown-tinted from all the organic material it flows through on the way to the sea. It rained almost the whole time we were out on the water—about three hours on the Sound. Really of course it’s a fiord, not a sound at all, created by glacial action, not by the flow of a river, though many watercourses flow into it. We must have seen a thousand waterfalls during the day, many of them 1000 feet or more in height, with several levels. If I had seen even one of them on any mountain wilderness trip I have ever been on, from the Sierras to the Alps to the Canadian Rockies to the North Cascades, I would have thought myself very very ucky. As it was, it was almost too much, like being forcefed! So many lacy white ones flowing over wide walls covered with mosses and ferns, so many in deep clefts in the steep rock walls, so many variations on different surfaces. Again and again I pointed up and John looked and nodded, all day long.
The soil on the sides of the fiords is very thin, only a few feet thick over the bedrock, and when the forest trees reach a certain size, there are tree avalanches, and all the vegetation plunges into the water. We saw many of these, the most recent only a few weeks old. Afterward, mosses and lichens and liverworts begin to colonize the rock, and then eventually small flowering plants and ferns and then trees as soil slowly forms, and then after the trees become too heavy for their shallow roots to anchor them on the steep slopes again there will be an avalanche of vegetation. The sea creatures have adapted, and some even eat the fallen trees in the water.
We saw Fiordland crested penguins—our first penguins in the wild. They were, of course, adorable—waddling up and down very steep glacier-polished rock on their little islands. They are endangered and only come to land on a couple of islands at the mouth of Doubtful Sound, and we were lucky to see as many as we did—probably 20. The boat that does the trips is very comfortable and the skipper got us up close to the islands and the fiord walls so that we could see many things, birds, plants, seals, waterfalls. At one point he turned off the engines and we drifted in silence for a few minutes, and we could hear the bellbirds and others in the forest. That was my favorite part of the trip.
We left Fiordland this morning, Sunday the 25th. It was very hard to leave, and I think it has been the place that has made us most sure we will make the effort to come back to NZ again. For me, it was like our raft trip in the Grand Canyon—I feel that to have been gifted with the experience of it has changed me, taught me something about reality, about interconnectedness, about beauty, that is hard to describe but deeply felt. I feel strengthened and humbled at the same time, and I honor these places in my heart.
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