Time for another long overdue update. The perils of being too comfortable have struck again, but we’ll get to that. I’ve done so many amazing hikes since the last post that this update will be more of a photo dump with light descriptions, rather than the lovingly crafted hike descriptions of posts past. I’m sure my readership won’t be disappointed by that, as describing every twist and turn of every hike is certainly only interesting to me. Videos for this post (usually one or two per hike) are here.

Alex Knob

The first major attraction I visited after the last post was the Franz Joseph glacier, where there are a few solid hikes to climb up and get a view of the glacier. This was my first taste of a more truly touristy area, with lots of tour buses coming through, and many people taking helicopter rides up to the glacier. Anyway, the first hike I did was Alex Knob, which is a solid climb, but not advised in poor weather, since it climbs up to where the clouds are. Needless to say…

Robert’s Point

I was all ready to just cut my losses after my cloudy Alex Knob experience, but a friend had strongly recommended Robert’s Point so I finally figured I’d give it a try. It was a great recommendation! This was a really cool trail with several swingbridges (including a very long one and a couple quite high ones), cool rocks, and an awesome view.

Fox Glacier

In the next valley over from Franz Joseph glacier is Fox Glacier. Besides the ubiquitous helicopter rides there aren’t so many vertical hikes, but there’s a lake where you can take a lovely walk and get great views of the glacier. I took the opportunity to play around with my new camera, and that night ended up at a beautiful campsite by a river where I took some more photos.

Brewster Glacier and Mount Armstrong

This was one of the absolute best hikes I’ve ever done. It starts with 2 hours of very steep climbing up to one of New Zealand’s famous huts (kind of a similar climb to the ole Mailbox Peak hike, for anyone in Seattle). From there you can take an informal but well-traveled trail that winds around the base of the mountain and leads you to the very foot of the Brewster Glacier, with blue lakes, a sequence of cascading waterfalls, and really cool rocks. You can walk right up to the glacier! You can touch it! You can climb on it! And the whole scene is just stunning.

There’s another trail, also informal but much less well-traveled, which leads from the hut up to the summit of Mount Armstrong. Calling it a trail is, frankly, misleading though. It’s actually just that you can see the summit of Mount Armstrong from the hut, and you just…. walk straight up to it. Calling it walking is, frankly, misleading though. Mount Armstrong is basically just a gigantic rock pile, so it’s more that you freeform scramble your way up these massive rocks to the summit.

I had planned to get to the hut, have a snack, then summit Mount Armstrong, and then come down and see the glacier. Somehow I started toward the summit, followed the cairns that mark the trail, and…. ended up at the glacier. This was no punishment, and after a bit of debate I decided to still head up to the top of the mountain. The only bummer was that it had been perfectly clear all day, but I didn’t get up on top of Mount Armstrong until about 5pm, by which point things were starting to cloud over. The views were still astonishing, but the 360 degree panorama was obscured on and off in various places. Rough life.

Mount Shrimpton

Despite the great name, this is pretty much the only hike I’ve done so far that I wouldn’t recommend. It’s similar to Mount Armstrong in that it’s a very steep official trail up to a point, and then just almost no trail at all where you scramble up to the top. But this scramble was over either long, slippery grass or small, slippery rocks and scree, and there were several different places where it was steep enough that if you started sliding it wasn’t clear that you would stop (before the valley floor, at least). So I spent a bit of this hike fairly scared, and ultimately the view at the top wasn’t quite as spectacular as Armstrong. Though I was also still sore and tired from Armstrong a couple days before, and maybe I’m just getting spoiled.

Wanaka

After all that hiking it was time for a bit of a break, and as luck would have it there was a soft landing spot waiting for me in the hip lake and mountain town of Wanaka. When I resurrected this blog, somewhere in the absolute avalanche of positive messages (HA!) was an email from my uncle George saying that he had some friends in Wanaka and I should look them up when I got there. Inveterate mooch that I am, I opened up lines of communication immediately. And that’s how I find myself kicking back and watching the Australian Open here in George (not my uncle, his friend is also named George) and Victoria’s beautiful house in Wanaka. As my uncle George pointed out, that didn’t take long!

Though I’d never met George and Victoria before they’ve taken me in like an old friend and shown incredible hospitality. These few days have been just the ticket after a month of van life, from the practical (laundry and a shower) to the spiritual (warm and friendly company, interesting conversation, incredible food). Last night I crashed a dinner they hosted for their friends Jane and Charlie, where they made an astonishingly tasty spread (and I don’t just say that because 30% of my recent diet has been canned beans) and Jane gave me tons of recommendations for my next hikes. Today Victoria brought me along to the social tennis meetup at their club where I accidentally played for 4 hours and had an absolute blast. I may not be able to lift my arm tomorrow, but it’ll have been worth it.

Upcoming plans are a bit hazy. I think we’ll all go for a bike ride tomorrow, and then I may start getting back to the hiking life the following day. There are a couple of day hikes around here I’m keen to check out, and then many more sights to see: Queenstown, Glenorchy, Te Anau, Milford Sound, Fiordland, the list goes on and on. I (of course) don’t have much of an itinerary planned out so we’ll just see how we go.

You can see the videos for this post (one or two per hike, usually) here.

Alright, we’re settling back into the familiar rhythm of sitting around not doing a whole lot, but still being too lazy to write a blog post. Truly, this is my sweet spot.

Picking up where we left off, I fled my surfing failure in Westport and spent a couple of nights in the tiny town (more of an intersection, really, I say with nothing but love in my heart) of Karamea, farther north up the coast, on the west side of Kahurangi National Park. The hotel/bar/gathering place in town lets you park your van for the night for $7.00, which, considering you get access to a clean bathroom and a complimentary, unlimited hot shower, is a steal. I had a nice lazy day filled with flat whites, meat pies, and reading, and got ready for a nice hike the next day.

The plan was to check out the Fenian cave loop, then walk the Oparara Valley track up to the Oparara and Moria arches. The walk to the caves was quick and easy, and the caves themselves were pretty neat. I had them almost entirely to myself, and spent a while stooping and scrambling into every crevice I could find. I turned off my headlamp at points to soak in the total darkness, keeping eyes open to feel them straining and straining and failing to pick up a single stray photon. Then closing them, opening them, and truly not being able to tell the difference. A cool feeling! I also stumbled across some more glow worms, which are always delightful.

After the caves I headed north on the Oparara Valley track. This section was a couple of hours of bliss, just a lovely mostly flat walk through gorgeous, deep green forest full of mosses and ferns, where I didn’t cross a single soul.

After a leisurely lunch at the trailhead on the Oparara side I set off to see what there was to see. It turns out the attraction there are the huge limestone arches over the Oparara river, and they are in fact stunning. I spent a while scrambling around the rocks, going up and down the river, getting different views of the arch, and eventually met a group of friendly Kiwis who offered to give me a ride back to my car. So instead of a 4 hour walk back I had a nice swim with them and drove over to check out another cave, which turned out to be the coolest one! It was much larger than the Fenian ones and had one passage in particular that you could explore quite deep. There were signs at the entrance talking about cave spiders, but I was skeptical we’d see any, since the signs said they were reclusive. But lo and behold, keeping an eye out paid dividends, and after I spotted the first one the floodgates opened and we must have ended up coming across 5 or 6. They were definitely pretty creepy! Quite large, lit up in the strange light of our headlamps, invariably staying completely still and often with bright bubbles of condensation on their legs and bodies. I really wish I had some pictures to upload here and creep everyone out, but I was tired at the end of the day and figured this would be a short scramble with nothing worth photographing. Lesson learned!

The next day I went back down to Westport, determined to give surfing another try. Lo and behold, I went out three more times and had a blast! I went to a different spot which is a bay where there’s a perfect riptide that goes up one side, so all you have to do is go over there and it pushes you out to the break. You don’t even have to paddle! My kind of surfing… I had fun playing around with the board I rented, which was shorter than what I’ve used in the past, and even managed to just start getting a little bit of the feeling of how to make quick turns.

So that’s where we’re at. Yesterday I made it down to the (relatively) large metropolis of Greymouth, and today I’m headed for a free camp near Whataroa, where I’ll be close to the hikes I want to do the next few days. I’ll close with a collection of miscellaneous local flavor and a selfie so you know I’m still alive and still ruggedly handsome. Also, I’m going to start including links to google photos albums where you can see the videos I took for the relevant post, since I’d have to pay to upload videos to this site, and I’m not about that life. They’re not necessarily good, but as with everything else on here, enter at the risk of your own boredom. Here are the videos for this post.

All the hiking I’ve done so far has been fun in its own right, but I’ve also specifically been trying to keep up a solid pace to build up fitness for huge day hikes. I got into these kinds of hikes when I was road tripping around the states in my lovely hatchback during the summer of 2019. The first taste I had was the incredible 19 mile Dawson/Pitamakan loop in Glacier National Park, and the crowning achievement was the Cactus to Clouds hike in Palm Springs, with Mount Whitney and an easy stroll up Half Dome also on the list (yes, I’m bragging). For whatever reason I seem to prefer these big day hikes to backpacking, probably because I get a bigger sense of achievement from them while also getting to sleep more comfortably and carry a lighter pack up the mountain.

Mount Owen was my first go at getting back to huge hikes. It’s typically summited as an overnight where you stay in one of New Zealand’s famous backcountry huts, but ain’t nobody got time for that. It’s a big day – my watch clocked it at 17 miles and 7,345 feet of elevation, and it took me 11.5 hours. On top of that it’s a pretty funky trail. Rather than just steadily climbing towards the summit, it starts off extremely steep uphill, then plunges extremely steep downhill, and then levels off for a long ways before getting extremely steep again up to the summit. So you have very steep uphill and downhill in both directions, which really gets the heart rate going. All the hiking beforehand did its job though, and I felt reasonably strong throughout.

The trail itself is absolutely magical, with maybe the most variety I’ve ever come across on a single trail. Passing through different ecotones as you gain elevation is always a cool part of hiking, and this trail did not disappoint. It started with a steep, difficult, bushwhacking ascent up a ridge, which then flattened out into a bit of a meadow. I started at 6:30am so everything was totally socked in and I was just walking through fog.

Very soon after that I got into a beautiful forest, and then quickly hit the steep downhill section. On the way down I passed a couple with big backpacking packs coming “down” from the hut, taking frequent breaks as they sweated up this steep section. If I hadn’t already been glad to have a small pack that certainly would have made me appreciate it. After this forested section things began to flatten out and open up a bit, right as the sun started burning off the clouds. I started to catch glimpses of the limestone peaks all around that I’d eventually be climbing.

Now the really cool sections of the trail began. First was a transition to what kind of felt like an oasis, with more tropical plants on either side and lots of yellow wildflowers everywhere. The ground was covered in the dead leaves of these plants that look so unusual to me, emphasizing how different this section looked. And then suddenly I was just hopping rock to rock, going up a dry riverbed. This continued for a while before things opened up into alpine meadows and I reached the hut. All the while I was getting more and more views of the limestone mountains all around.

From this point it was like a completely different hike. I was above the treeline cruising through alpine meadows with lovely tarns, including one that had an adorable little island in it. The whole time I was looking up at all the peaks around me, wondering which one I was going to end up climbing, and how. The how turned out to be quite the thing – it’s hard to capture in pictures, but the rocks were amazing, glacier-carved limestone that really looked like flowing water. The trail went from a well maintained path to a series of rock cairns where you pretty much had to just pick your way through the rocks, climbing around and hopping over several quite deep crevasses.

Eventually the rock-hopping stopped and it became a very, very steep scramble up to the summit. And man was it worth it! The top was a mostly flat slab of limestone, and it afforded 360 degree views of mountains in every direction. The sun was out, lunch was on, and man, I felt great.

On the way back I immediately took a wrong turn and spent about 20 minutes scrambling around rocks off track. So that was a good start. I eventually got myself reoriented and managed not to lose the trail again. I really enjoyed how things look different when you’re moving in the opposite direction, and took the chance to snap a few more photos. I also took an alternative route for the very last section, which consisted of a very steep, muddy, tree-crossed, poorly formed trail down along a stream through beautiful forest, and then a flat stroll to the end. I was glad to have done that section on the way down rather than up.

So that was Mount Owen, a hell of day. After that I finally made it over to the west coast and spent a couple of nights in Westport. I bought a camera from a store up in Auckland and am waiting for them to ship it to a hostel in Westport, so I figured I’d spend a few days there surfing to mix things up and give my legs a break. Yesterday I went and rented a board and headed out for a disastrous surf session – I couldn’t get out past the break! I knew I was going to be out of shape, but that was enough of a bummer that it put me off a bit. And as it happens a huge swell was coming in today, so I decided to switch the plan up again and head north up the coast, to the other side of Kahurangi National Park. I’m planning on hiking the next two days and then heading back down to Westport once the swell is more manageable, where I’ll get past the break or die trying!