This past week and a half has been a bit of a “where has the time gone” type of stretch. I spent another couple of days in Wanaka – the bike ride was beautiful, I took a day to rest, did more laundry, and looked into what to do next. Somewhere in there I hiked the Rob Roy glacier track. I’ll be honest, maybe the hikes are just coming too thick and fast these days, but I don’t remember it that well! The pictures I’m now looking through, a bit bewildered, are nice though.

After Wanaka I crossed the Crown Range to Queenstown, a gorgeous (if very slow in my van) drive through the mountains. Queenstown felt very much like a slightly bigger Wanaka. Still a very small resort/vacation town (population 16,000!) set on a beautiful lake with striking mountains all around. Very touristy, full of people visiting, with lots of activities to do. I spent a couple of days doing some restocking and hiked the Ben Lomond trail, which leaves right out of town. My hike was… just ok. I was tired and it was a cloudy, rainy day, so that certainly didn’t help. But the first part of the trail is through an adventure eco-park type thing where you’re walking under ziplines and then are eventually routed through the massive restaurant/gift shop/tram complex. On top of that, the whole thing was very much under construction, which was both ugly and loud. Once you’re past that monstrosity it’s a much more peaceful and beautiful hike, but unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate. I went past the saddle and a bit of the ways up to the summit, but the rain was getting stronger and I was literally walking into a cloud, so I decided that was enough for the day and headed back down. I don’t think I took a single photo. You win some, you lose some.

Next I lined up some hikes in the Glenorchy area. Glenorchy is a village about an hour northwest of Queenstown along Lake Wakatipu. There’s very little here, it mostly just serves as a staging area to get into the wilderness beyond. One of the Great Walks, the Routeburn Track, starts close to here, and it’s a very heavily trafficked area. My first day after getting over here I hiked a portion of the Routeburn, about 15km in to Harris Saddle and Conical Hill (which didn’t seem especially conical to me). It was nice, but for whatever reason I didn’t find the scenery especially striking. I did get to see a top of the line example of one of New Zealand’s famous “wilderness huts”, which are really more like full on hostels if you ask me. This one accommodated 50 people, had flush toilets and gas stoves, and generally seemed pretty deluxe. And that was the “roughing it” option, since there’s also a private company that takes tours of 20+ people along the Routeburn, staying in their lodges with catered meals, showers, alcohol sales, and who knows what else. Deluxe!

Since my Routeburn hike was a solid 9 hours, I had a few smaller hikes planned to break things up a bit before going for the equally hefty Earnslaw Burn track. But the forecast showed rain coming in the next few days and the reviews said Earnslaw Burn was a tricky trail, so I decided to try to seize the good weather and just did back to back 9 hour days of hiking. Earnslaw Burn did in fact turn out to be quite a difficult hike, with the trail in medium shape and lots of short, steep up and down sections. Unlike the Routeburn, though, I found the scenery absolutely stunning. The trail is basically just a straight line out and back through a huge valley, with the payoff being a single mountain covered in a massive glacier, feeding waterfalls that cascade down all over the place. I don’t know if it was the difficulty of the trail, how many fewer people there were, the sheer, overhanging sides of the valley, or the mountain/glacier/waterfall triumvirate, but I enjoyed this hike much more than the Routeburn. It was really stunning.

I was pretty beat after those two long days so I took yesterday and today to just rest up and hang around Glenorchy. I think I’ll go for another long hike in this area tomorrow on the McIntosh Loop, and then the day after likely restock in Queenstown before starting to head around Lake Wakatipu towards Fiorldand and Milford Sound. I’ve also been having fun playing with my new toy and taking some Attempted Artsy Photographs (the clouds are for you Michelle!), so I’ll include some of those below. Videos for this post are here.