Aquabear to Lake: Is that all you got?

I live and work on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, one of New Zealand’s largest and deepest lakes, glacially-fed with an average surface temperature of about 50-55 degrees Fahrenheit. The lake’s deepest part is more than 1,000 feet down. It was used as a stand-in location for Loch Ness in a movie.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yeah! Let’s go swimming!

I’ve been wanting to swim in the lake ever since moving here, but I’m not one of those superhuman people who do the cold-water, long-distance swimming without a wetsuit (I know because I read up on it… they have exactly the body type I don’t, with extra layers of insulating fat around their torsos). So I needed a wetsuit. Easier said than done. At 6′ tall and with more than a little junk in the trunk, I am too big for the women’s suits, which seem to be made for teeny tiny little scraps of waifer-thin creatures. But the men’s suits are big in all the wrong places and too small everywhere else.

I was on a mission my first month here, trying on every wetsuit I could squeeze my foot into (which, interestingly enough, was not many… I have big feet, too). There are few things simultaneously more comical and more frustrating than trying on a wetsuit that’s doomed not to fit in a sporting goods store dressing room. I’d just about given up, but on my weekend in Dunedin back in November, I passed a store that was having its annual wetsuit sale, went in and tried on three different suits.

The third one fit like it was made for me.

Which, when it comes to wetsuits, means it only took 15 minutes to get on instead of half an hour of grunting, wriggling, squeezing and squirming.

I bought it (40 percent off! Yeah!) and, to anyone else in my position (but not in my wetsuit… it’s mine! Hands off!), here’s a tip: find a guy who knows what the hell he’s talking about. When I walked in and expressed my fear that there was no wetsuit to fit me, the guy at R&R Sports looked me up and down with a practiced eye and said “you need an O’Neill suit.” He was right… I ended up with an O’Neill women’s suit, the name of which is either EPIC or BLACKOUT, since those are the two words written on the suit (other than O’Neill). I liked the idea of swimming in a freezing cold lake in a suit called EPIC BLACKOUT, given the not far-fetched risk of hypothermia.

Anyway… O’Neill suits are apparently cut from taller fit models than other suits, and have more stretch, which is why I can not only zip mine up but actually swim in it with full range of motion.

I heart you, O’Neill.

My suit is a 3/2 suit, which is thinner than what I should be swimming in here, but, ahem, I have my own natural insulation to make up for not having a 4/3 suit (the numbers relate to the material’s thickness in millimeters; the first number is the suit’s thickness around your vital organs and the second number is around your extremities, which apparently are more expendable than, say, your spleen).

I took my suit out for a swim first on Diamond Lake, a smaller, shallower lake nearby that’s popular with fly fishermen, though none were around the afternoon I plunged in. Diamond Lake might be a little warmer, a lot less deep and without the waves and currents of Lake Wakatipu, but it was no heated pool, let me tell you. It’s also surrounded by sheep and cow pastures, with a lot of run-off and somewhat murky water. All I could think of was how little I wanted to have giardia again. I’ve had it several times and once you’ve got it, it’s the gift that keeps giving. Ugh.

So I worked up my nerve to swim in Lake Wakatipu. It is big. It’s got its own seiche, which is a surface oscillation similar to a tide, sometimes found in high, large mountain lakes. On a windy day (and there are many here) it gets swells. Did I mention it’s around 50-55 degrees and more than 1,000 feet deep in places?

I dove in, ready for that awful first minute, as the wetsuit fills with cold, cold water and my lungs scream GETMEOUTOFHERE! The way wetsuits work, in case you don’t know (I didn’t until I started my mission), is that they allow a thin layer of water in, over your entire body, which your body then heats, creating a protective layer of warmth that the suit then traps.

I know all this but it still doesn’t stop me from spending the first minute in the water thrashing around sputtering expletives and wondering why I can’t just sit on a couch and play Nintendo like everyone else.

Once the wetsuit warms that trapped layer of water, though, it’s wonderful. I wouldn’t say I was warm, but I was comfortable. Except for my feet. My feet are miserable throughout a cold water swim and for a long time later.

Dear Santa: all I really want for Christmas is a pair of neoprene booties. They make them, and I’m buying them, as soon as I can find a pair in my size for a reasonable price.

Other than frozen feet, the only difficult part of swimming in the lake is the drop-off. Specifically, seeing it. When I’m swimming away from shore, the water is clear and the bottom drops steeply away. There is something terrifying on a primeval level about willingly swimming into deep water. I haven’t been bothered at all by it when I’ve done triathlons, but I think only because I knew the bottom was there, 40 or 50 feet down at most.

In Lake Wakatipu, seeing how steeply it drops and knowing just how deep it goes, it’s hard not to panic. I get the same feeling I got when my friend Laura and I were on Lake Baikal and looking over the side of the boat, able to see the chasm below through the crystal clear water.

Since my eventual goal is to swim to the islands in the middle of the lake, however, I’m forcing myself to get over the whole abyss thing (did I mention the lake was a stunt double for Loch Ness?). I do this either by swimming with my eyes closed (if I can’t see it, it’s not there, right? Right??) or doing the backstroke until I am far enough out that I can’t see anything below me, and the water is just a lovely shade of milky turquoise thanks to the rock flour. (Rock flour is made by glaciers grinding down rocks into tiny particles that then float in the water and reflect the light, giving glacially-fed waters those fantastic pale blue, glowing hues.)

Of course, I still occasionally get panicky moments, which always begin the same way:

SHARKS!

I know there are no sharks in the lake. I think it’s just a fear response instilled in me when my grandfather took me to see “Jaws” at the tender age of six. There are trout and eels, some really big eels, but no real predators. There aren’t even sea lions that could mistake me for an extremely large, ill-formed penguin. Also, there have been no claims of a Nessie or Champ-like monster in the lake (I checked).

Of course, since no one swims in the lake aside from a couple people in the height of summer in a few shallow beach areas, I figure that just may mean the lake monster hasn’t had the opportunity to try human flesh. Yet.

I get over the panic by doing the backstroke for a little while (again, if I can’t see it, it’s not there) and staring up at the sky, the clouds, the shoulders of the mountains that seem to lean in on all sides. And swimming in the lake itself is magical (again, once I get past the giant freshwater shark thing). The water feels and smells and tastes incredibly pure, and also old… I mean old in an ancient sense, as if it’s always been there and has seen millennia go by. I do feel like I’m swimming in Middle Earth.

Swimming is always very relaxing for me, but even moreso in Lake Wakatipu (aside from the shark thing), where I find sometimes I like to just float, face up or face down, feeling like a speck of rock suspended in the cold water, contemplating nothingness, my world silent but for the swoosh of waves past my ears (and sometimes, when it’s windy, over my head).

I’m sure one of these days some passing motorist will call emergency services to report a body floating motionless in the lake, but until then, Dear Santa: I really, really need those booties.

Lake Wakatipu looking south

Pigeon Island

My Epic Blackout

Aquabear in action

Bill. Is. Awesome.

Bill and I hit the road right after work today to take advantage of the last fine weather scheduled for the next few days… it’s supposed to be rather squally for a spell.

I left work around 2:30 pm, meaning I had only seven more hours of daylight… sorry to rub it in, all you Northern Hemipshere citizens. So we headed for the fabled Skippers Canyon, home to a LoTR location (you knew there would be a LoTR connection, right?), a ghost town from the 19th century gold rush and a road so dangerous that rental vehicles are prohibited and even if you have your own car, the Skippers Road is exempt from coverage in insurance policies.

Well.

Back in August, when I was renting Skylon, my campa, the guy who did the booking warned me there were three places I could most definitely not take it. One, 90 Mile Beach up near Cape Reinga, a beach of deep sand where tourists notoriously get their rental vehicles stuck and abandon them at high tide. Well, duh. Who would take a car on deep sand? Two, a hardcore 4WD road basically up Mt. Cook. You just have to look at a map and see that would be a bad idea. And three…

Skippers Road.

First, much love to Bill, my very used, and not always gently, 1994 Subaru Legacy Turbo 250 Station Wagon. Bill handled the steep inclines and declines, hairpin curves and loose gravel with the greatest of ease.

Second, an apology to Bill… honey, I’m so sorry I took you down those two stretches of road that were really fit only for a high-clearance vehicle. Or a tank. If I’d known, I would never have tried it. If there had been a place to turn around, we wouldn’t have gone further. But you came through for me, buddy. Even when you scraped your belly on boulders or groaned with effort to get through deep sand or tipped into a pothole big enough to build a hot tub in, you never snapped an axle or let a tire get flat or crack your gasline. You, Bill, are a rock star.

To be honest, aside from the two hellish spots mentioned above, the road was not bad at all. I could see it being a nightmare if one was afraid of heights or just a lousy driver, but I’ve been on many a road in worse shape, especially on some of the mountain tracks I took Kali, my much loved Ford Focus back in Colorado.

The most amazing thing to me about Skippers Road was that it was built in the 19th century. By hand. When they found gold in them thar hills round about 1860 or so, they needed a way to get to the shiny stuff and get it out, not to mention a route to ship in all the essentials that the miners would need… booze, broads, bibles, etc.

The road stretches for some 18 km (about 12 miles) through beautiful, dramatic schist landscapes, bordered by snow-dusted mountains. Near its end is the location used in “The Fellowship of the Ring” as the backdrop for where the Nazgul and their horses are standing when Arwen challenges them to cross the river and take Frodo from her. A little further along is a bridge that people bungy off of (this is New Zealand, after all) and at the end of the road is what’s left of Skippers, a once-thriving town that sprang up around the gold boom.

And it was a real town, with a school and its own rugby and cricket teams. They’ve restored bits of it and let others fall into romantic decay. The old cemetery is still occasionally used for burials and there’s a campground back behind what looked like old stables. At first I thought ooh, a campground with no one else around, cool. It would be a little creepy, though, to stay in the middle of a deserted town, especially one where I felt at times a presence, the sense of being watched. It freaked me out a bit and I was glad to know that valiant Bill could get me the hell out of there if we needed to bolt.

Strangely, one place I didn’t feel weird was the cemetery. I like old tombstones. I like to see the fonts, the language used, the details of the dead that someone felt were important enough to record. Of the people buried there, most were from somewhere else… Scotland, Cornwall, China. It made me think about the old cemeteries near where I used to live in Colorado, and all the foreigners buried there, from Norway and Germany and yes, Scotland, some nationalities and even names unknown. They were contemporaries of most of the folks buried at Skippers, all of them people who ventured far from home in the second half of the 19th century in search of gold or some other precious metal. It’s a period of history in which I have no particular interest, but standing in the Skippers cemetery I did start to wonder what it must have been like in those decades of one mad gold rush after another, how many people actually migrated to the boomtowns, how many dreamed it would really change their fortunes

It also made me wonder why there were so many booms during that period, from California and Colorado all the way to the South Island of New Zealand. Was it because travel and communication had just become (relatively) easier than in the millennia before? Was it a fad, the “thing to do” for a spell, like leg warmers or Twitter? Why did some people from, say, Scotland end up in Colorado and others in New Zealand? Did many go from one boom to the next all around the world?

I had no answers to my questions, but on the drive back I did stop a few times at pieces of the original hand-laid schist walls to admire the work and think about the people, the horses, mules and donkeys who built that long, lonely, snaky road to what was once “the richest river in the world” and is now deserted, save for a thriving population of rabbits.

If you want to read more about Skippers Road, click here… There are also some cool vintage photos I couldn’t quite recreate with my fancy 21st century digital camera.

Skippers Road Approach

Make mine a double cone

Creepiest Informational Signage Ever

Welcome Home!

The Macnicol family grave

The Mitchels

William Williams

Headstone in Chinese

Robert Duncan

Not a bad view for eternity

Otago Hotel ruins

Schist Happens

Miner’s Shack

Droopy Lupin

View from Skippers Site

Skippers Bridge

Skippers Canyon

Ford of Bruinen

Skippers Road

Hand-capped schist wall on Skippers Road

Looking north from south end of Skippers Road

Guess Who Came to Dinner?

We have a plethora of horses, rabbits, feral goats, chickens, roosters, sheep, feral cats and “heaps” of birds (“heaps” being the word Kiwis use when others would say “lots”), but only one Crystal. That’s our neighbor/my sous chef’s thirteen-year-old dog, wobbly on her back end and completely deaf. She roams freely during the day and when she barks, because she can’t hear herself, it sounds like an old man snoring and then waking himself up and gasping in surprise.

We had the porch doors open in the fine summer weather last night, so Crystal just walked in and set up in the kitchen, first sticking her head in our garbage can and then sitting at my feet with the look of love… love for my food, of course. She got a poached egg and a pear core from me. That’s a face that cannot be denied.

A Good Sort of Dispute

With a day off and the weather fine, yesterday I made for one of the gazillion day hikes in the area where I live: Moke Lake Loop, reportedly a two and a half hour trail. Whatever. One thing that really frustrates me about New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (the rough equivalent to the National Park Service in the States, more or less, but largely less…) is their trail descriptions. They never give distance or elevation gain, only how much time they claim it takes to do the hike, whether in their pamphlets, online or on the trail signs.

Problem is, those trail times are a joke. I would describe myself as a slow but steady hiker, yet I’ve done some hikes easily in half the time they allegedly take… and other hikes have taken me two or even three times as long as estimated.

In any case, the Moke Lake Loop, following the horseshoe-shaped lake’s cliffs and shore, was so easy and fast that I decided to tack on the route to and from nearby Lake Dispute. Later I looked on a map and figured out that I did ten miles all told, though it felt like half that. It was the kind of trail I could walk on for a long time… a little rolling but largely flat, with a couple steeper but manageable spots, beautiful scenery and not another soul in sight. Unless you count the cows and sheep, which I had to walk right past. Fortunately I’ve gotten over my bovinephobia so it wasn’t a problem. Still, I don’t like the way they look at me. I can tell they’re plotting something.

I don’t know why it’s called Lake Dispute, by the way… The DOC pamphlet I have is mum on that or any other useful information, and when I tried to search it online I found a lot of news stories about various waterway disagreements rather than an explanation for the name. So it will just have to have an air of mystery. Like those cows.

Moke Lake

Cow gauntlet!

Moke Lake looking north

Lake Dispute

The claws!

Cheese and Penguins, Perfect Together

No, not for eating… well, the cheese, yes, of course.

Oamaru is on the South Island’s east coast, about two-thirds of the way down from the top… they saved the downtown’s charming industrial Victorian architecture (how often does one get to say “charming industrial” and mean it?) from the wrecking ball and put in a lot of cafes and art galleries and crafty places, making it a neat place to stroll around on an afternoon. Not that I did much of that.

I was on a mission. Two missions. Distracted only by a delicious almond paste cookie from the bakery in the touristy old downtown (mmmm, almond paste), I made for opposite ends of the city (not at the same time).

First: Whitestone Cheese Company. Oh, yessss, preciousssssss…. I got to see burly young lads washing curds and stirring whey and manfully handling wheels of cheese by peeping through the viewing gallery and then had a tasting. To be frank, I have tasted most of Whitestone’s offerings already, putting one (or two) into my basket when I go grocery shopping, but they had a few I haven’t seen in the store, including a sumptuously creamy goat brie called Parsons Rock and an aged version of their gazillion award-winning Windsor Blue. Yum.

Next: penguins. Not just any penguins. Fairy penguins. I’d seen a couple at the Yellow-Eyed Penguin Reserve back in September, but Oamaru is famous for having a large blue penguin colony. Blue penguins, called fairy penguins in Australia and also in general by people who like a bit of whimsy in their language, are the smallest of the 17 penguin species. They are very much the opposite of my favorite, the Yellow-Eyed loner Penguins. Blues are very social and very, uhm, into gettin’ down… A breeding pair can have as many as four chicks in a single season!

I stopped by the colony for a daytime tour to peek into the little nests they’ve built for them, then returned at nightfall for the big penguinpalooza. Alas there is no photography allowed, but each night a couple hundred penguins return from the sea and waddle up the rocky incline to their nests, whereupon they are greeted with much raucousness… from chicks that want to be fed, from mates who want to get down and get busy even with several dozen tourists staring at them, from competitors and even from a couple rabbits who also live in the predator-free reserve and seemed to enjoy hopping around the mayhem.

It was amazing to watch the penguins come in… unlike the yellow-eyed penguins that come to shore alone, blue penguins form a “raft” or cluster a couple hundred feet offshore and then all ride the surf in together. One penguin is clearly the point man and comes ashore first, stands still looking around himself, takes a step, looks around again, etc. The point penguin leads all the way up to the nesting area.

Curiously, the “rafts” seemed to be organized by neighborhood. A batch of penguins came in and all went to the same general stretch of the nesting area, followed by another and another, all to different parts of the colony. All I could think of was commuters coming home after a hard day’s work.

Exiting the colony, you have to drive along a narrow road that runs beside the harbor. There are signs warning to go slow because of penguins and they mean it. I saw several little guys wandering along the road, looking a bit lost, or maybe just in search of happy hour at the nearest pub.

Although I didn’t take any photos (flash photography scares them and the last thing I want to do is traumatize a wee fairy penguin who’s spent the day looking for fish to regurgitate to its chicks and dodging leopard seals and such), you can see some penguins crossing the road about halfway through this video I found on YouTube.

In the same neck of the woods, Karl and I checked out the Moeraki Boulders, which are odd giant concretions just sitting on the beach. Fascinating, though it really made me wonder why they are all piled up in one spot and nowhere else.

Oamaru Downtown

Penguin, Er, Threesome

Finding Fairies

Penguin Xing

Please Don’t Eat the Penguins

Clear Waters off Oamaru

Graves Trail

Moeraki Boulders

Karl Hatches

Moeraki Lineup

More Moeraki

Karl Embouldened

Now We’re Cookin’

For a long time, I thought Mount Cook was a big deal. Like, huge… it must be like 25,000 feet, right? I mean, it’s the tallest mountain in a country of mountains, the tallest in Australasia, in fact, a region that I thought had plenty of big volcanos (though to be honest I’m a bit fuzzy on what exactly qualifies as “Australasian”).

Fueling my image of the mountain, it has such an iconic place in mountaineering, spoken of with a reverence otherwise heard only about the Himalayan monsters. It was where Hillary (Sir Ed, not Clinton) trained before tackling Everest. It’s claimed a lot of lives and limbs, including the two legs of the mountaineer Mark Inglis (who lost them to frostbite but went on to summit Everest as the first double amputee, which is pretty amazing when you think of how most of us couldn’t get halfway up the mountain on two good legs)…

Well, it’s not that big.

Standing at 3754 meters (that works out to about 12,300 feet or so), Mt. Cook is actually shorter than Byers Peak, a mountain I’ve climbed, fer crissakes. On a day hike. No crampons (or cramps) involved. (And yes, Byers Peak is the mountain by which I measure all others. I became quite smitten with it when I lived in Colorado. For the record Byers is 12,800 feet high, give or take.)

So what’s all the hullabaloo about?

Well, for starters, Mt. Cook’s Maori name, Aoraki, is pretty cool… it means “cloud piercer,” which is a much cooler name than, well, Mt. Cook (apologies to the good Captain but come on, does he have to have everything named after him?). And when you see it in person, it is a beautiful, commanding mountain, with a tangible presence that many taller mountains don’t have.

And, standing within a few kilometers of its base, looking up and following the lines of the rock, the thick stretches of rumpled blue-white ice, the improbable prickly angles of its ridges, the ice cornices and sheer drops, even someone with virtually no mountaineering experience (like me) would come to the conclusion: damn, that would be a bitch to climb.

So mad props to all the brave souls who have climbed it. Me, I stayed on the ground, starting my visit with an early morning hike up Hooker Valley to the lake of the same name, the end point for, yep, Hooker Glacier. The views across the lake to Aoraki were stunning, though. Next I did a short hike to Kea Point to gawk at the Huddleston, Stocking and Mueller glaciers. The Mueller is an ugly, dirty, spent-looking glacier but the Huddleston and Stocking were picturesquely draped around the shoulders of Mt. Sefton and The Footstool in blinding blue-white. In a few spots, you could see long horizontal creases and cracks that suggested an impending avalanche, though none transpired. Dang it.

My next destination was the Sir Edmund Hillary Alpine Centre which I have to say was the only disappointment of the day. Even with my YHA discount it cost me NZ$21 for a couple rooms with some questionable exhibits, including one on uniforms at the hotel that hosts the centre. There was also a 3D movie about Mt. Cook that might have been cool but had the worst music and weird pacing and, quite frankly, cheesy effects.

There wasn’t much on Hillary himself, aside from an interesting documentary on the Everest ascent and a lifesize model you could “measure up to.” There were bits and pieces on other Cook climbers (that’s where I learned about Inglis), some of them very curiously done. The poster about Freda du Faur, for example, the first woman to have summited Mt. Cook, noted that she ignored conventions of the day and camped at night with men while climbing the mountain. Okay. Interesting note. But then the next paragraph was inexplicably in bold and said she had no interest in men at all and later had a long-term relationship with another woman. Uhm, ok… I wasn’t sure whether they included that tidbit, in bold print no less, as “see! we’re progressive! we can talk about lesbians openly!” or, conversely, “see? we knew something just wasn’t right about her all along… freaky chick mountain climber…”

Very odd.

There was also a poster on Duncan Darroch, an “eccentric” lover and painter of the mountains who lived alone in a hut for decades with only his dog for company. The tone of that particular display was “talented painter, but a bit of a nutter… and what a loser never to have married!” Though I say, good on you, Duncan. You rock. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I also liked his paintings quite a bit, as well as the fact that he refused to sell any to people who smoked!

From the disappointing Centre it was a quick stop at The Old Mountaineers’ Cafe for a tasty pumpkin ginger soup which had a deliciously generous amount of ginger in it and a tasty, peppery cheese scone, not to mention a spectacular view of Mt. Cook. Tip: if you’re visiting, stop there for lunch and instead of blowing bucks on the Hillary Centre, spend time at the Department of Conservation Visitor Center. Gobs of good information and displays and totally free. If only I’d gone there first…

I drove out to the Tasman Glacier carpark and spent some time on the trail there. It’s New Zealand’s longest and biggest glacier but the bit you can see at the terminus looks more like Mordor than the scrumptious blue-white whipped cream of Huddleston and Stocking (I always think glaciers like that would taste delicious… like minty Italian meringue or something… mmmmmm…).

Morning at Mt. Cook

Alpine Memorial

I Give You Princess Buttercup!

Iceberg, Dead Ahead!

Hooker Lake

Huddleston and Stocking Glaciers

Huddleston Glacier

Swing Low Sweet Bridge

Pukaki Valley

Karl at the Mueller

The Old Man and the Mountain

Stalwhart Stick Man

Rock Zombie

Sir Ed, Aoraki and Karl

Tasman Glacier

Farewell to Aoraki

Looking A Gift Horse in the Mouth

The lawnmower communally owned and used in the staff housing area where I live is broken. That is, the mechanical lawnmower. This being what people living in the sticks would call the boondocks, we don’t need no stinkin’ mechanical lawnmower…

We have Tigger.

Tigger belongs to our neighbors (and co-workers), who put up temporary fencing around different areas of the three houses, letting Tigger do his very best lawn maintenance (he keeps the grass tidy and also fertilizes it… it’s a twofer…).

For whatever reason, Tigger hasn’t been in our yard for a while. Our grass was getting knee-high and there was talk first of trying to fix the mechanical lawnmower and then, more seriously, of buying a goat or two, or capturing one of the wild goats that we’ve all spotted while hiking.

I guess that would technically be “kidnapping.”

Then Tigger came back. In just a few hours this afternoon, he pretty much munched half our yard down to stubble. We understand he’ll be back tomorrow, so the local feral goat population can rest easy, without fear of abduction.

Although Tigger is not particularly social (he’s very focused on eating grass), I did lure him in for a few close-ups with a delicious carrot.

The Lawnmower

Horses are Large

All carrot, no stick

Coming Down the Mountain

Today I climbed Mt. Alfred.

Tomorrow I hope to be able to get out of bed.

Mt. Alfred isn’t particularly tall. It’s a hobbit mountain, in fact, just about 4500 feet, surrounded by peaks near double its height. But the track up its side, with about a 3500 foot gain in elevation in a very short distance, is relentlessly steep (on the way down all I could think of was “The Mountain Song” by Jane’s Addiction… I screamed just like Perry more than once as the steep ground slid out from under my feet).

The mountain itself reminded me a lot of Byers Peak in Colorado… similar shape, though Byers is nearly 13,000 feet. Since you start the Byers trail from about 9000 feet, however, the elevation gain is the same. Both Alfred and Byers stand on their own, surrounded by walls of other mountains. Both have more than a few false summits as you make the final push to the top. And both reward the determined with 360 degree vistas.

Some trails are amazing, some are tough but worth it, some are a nice stroll. The trail up Mt. Alfred just felt, well… mean-spirited. The first third was entirely steep switchbacks through a forest. I missed those switchbacks when I got to the second third, which was essentially charging straight up the side of the mountain, still in forest cover. The final third was above bushline and even steeper. I had to scramble and do a bit of impromptu rock climbing to get to the top ridge, which was mercifully flat.

Getting down was hell, and truth be told I took a wee tumble to start, losing my footing on slippery scree and schist shards covered with long, slick tussock grasses. After landing more or less intact, I tried to get up again only to wind up sledding several meters more on a large, loose piece of schist. What can I say. Schist happens. No real injuries, just some bumps and bruises, but still not fun. Once I got back below bushline, the steep trail did a number on my bad ankles. By the time I got back to Bill, waiting patiently at the trailhead, I felt a good 15 years older than when I’d started out.

That said, the weather was perfect, bright sun with just enough of a cool breeze to be comfortable. And the views from the summit were breathtaking in every direction, including the Routeburn Valley, home to the start of the famous Routeburn Track, Mt. Earnslaw (which had a starring role in LotR as Methedras), the Dart Valley (which also had a starring role as Isengard), Lake Wakatipu (second largest and third deepest lake in New Zealand, shaped either like a lightning bolt or half of a swastika, depending on your perspective)…

Perhaps most importantly, on my to-do list, there’s now a nice big check beside Mt. Alfred.

Mt. Alfred

Karl at the summit

View from the top

The Braided Dart

Lake Sylvan and Mt. Earnslaw

The Summit

Routeburn Valley

Steep Slope

What Lies Beneath

Karl, Bill and I spent our day off getting Bill a much-needed oil change and stocking up on vegetables and fruit for the week (the nearest grocery store is a 60 mile roundtrip from where I live). In between, we worked in a short hike up to Lake Alta.

You know there is a LotR reference coming, so let’s just get it over with. Lake Alta served as Dimrill Dale in Fellowship… after Gandalf “falls” in Moria (a rather understated way of describing him getting yanked down into oblivion by a freakin’ fiery demon), the surviving members of the fellaship run out of the mines (initially onto Mt. Owen, located up in the north of the South Island, where bad weather thwarted my attempts to visit it). Well, the next scene is of them coming off the mountain and heading into Lorien, Aragorn leading the way, manfully splashing through a stream. That’s the scene that was filmed at Lake Alta.

Sadly, there was no chance for me to recreate the scene by splashing, uhm, womanfully through a stream because (almost) everything around Lake Alta is still frozen and buried under snow.

To get there, you have to drive to the top of the Remarkables Ski Field. Then you walk uphill. The ski field was closed for the season, but there was still plenty of snow around, especially once I got above the chairlifts. It was packed down well in most places, however, and not too difficult to deal with.

Above the ski field, I had a hard time finding the trail markers, many of which were buried (I assume) under snow. So I had to bushwhack a bit, including climbing up a couple rocky slopes, trying my best not to step on any of the lichen.

Along the way, I thought I was imagining things flitting around me. Am I going snowblind? It was an overcast day, but still bright, that weird kind of gray but intense light that makes the snow almost glow.

Then something landed on my hand… It was a grasshopper. A big one.

I couldn’t believe that here, in the middle of a snowfield, with wind strong enough to get me off-balance, was an insect I associate with lazy summer days.

(At the time, I didn’t know what the hell it was, but fortunately, the Lake Alta viewpoint had some interpretational signage that noted the area is home to the alpine grasshopper. I love interpretational signage.)

The hike itself was short and steadily uphill, the last bit along a rocky ridge. Lake Alta sits at about 1800 meters (5900 feet) above sea level, and I could feel the air getting thinner, though interestingly I didn’t feel adversely affected by it – perhaps a lingering effect of living at 9000 feet in Colorado.

In any case, by the time I reached the lake to find the LotR location unrecognizable due to the snow, I’d already had the big excitement of the day…

Trying to find the path across the snow and up a shorter ridge of rock and ice, I stood still for a moment, looking for the best way onward. I heard a funny sound and thought wow, the wind is really making a crazy noise through the rocks. Then I realized it wasn’t the wind making the sound. The sound of rushing, angry water was coming from below my feet. I was standing on top of a thawing, apparently raging river, with who knew how many feet (inches? centimeters?) of possibly highly unstable late season snow between me and a very cold splash. The thought of falling through the snow and getting sucked down some kind of thaw tunnel made me decide to move on… and to find an alternate route back down.

That raging rush of wild water, by the way, was Rastus Burn (great name!), which takes water from Lake Alta all the way down to the Kawarau River… which starred as the River Anduin in Fellowship. You knew there’d be an LotR connection, didn’t you?

Burn, Rastus Burn!

Upward

Alpine Karl

Really Alpine Karl

Lake Alta trail

Jiminy Crickets!

On semi-solid ground

Ranging in Dunedin

Dunedin is the fifth largest city in New Zealand, after Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Hamilton (though I hear Tauranga is giving it a run for the fifth spot…) and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Lord of the Rings movies. No studios, no filming locations. Nada. Nichts. Nichevo.

And yet…

Everytime I think of Dunedin, I think of LotR. This is me we’re talking about, after all.

I make the LotR connection because for the first month I was in New Zealand, I was pronouncing Dunedin as “doo-ne-DINE,” as in the Dunedain, the Northern Rangers (such as Aragorn) descended from the Numenorians. Kiwis smiled as only Kiwis can when someone is mangling their place-names. Only when I caught a weatherman pronouncing it properly – “duh-NEED-en” – did I realize my error.

Unfortunately, the LotR pronunciation was already imprinted in my brain, so now, whenever I am about to say “Dunedin,” my brain does a quick back handspring from LotR to the Roger Waters song “Dunroamin’ Duncarin’ Dunlivin’” to which I add “Duneedin’” and it all works out. At least no one’s been giving me that patient, slightly patronizing smile anymore.

It’s a good think I learned how to say Dunedin because it’s my favorite New Zealand city (though I liked both Auckland and Wellington… Christchurch and Hamilton, eh, not so much… as for Tauranga, haven’t been. Yet.). It’s a lot like a small and manageable San Francisco without the appalling traffic or high prices. Great architecture, lots of hills, the sea at your doorstep and plenty of interesting shops and restaurants and museums.

The first time I was in Dunedin I was just driving through it enroute to see the awesome Yellow-Eyed Penguin Colony, but this weekend I spent two days just in the city, checking out a few of the museums, eating Indian food, walking up and down the hills to work off the Indian food and shopping at Lush (I had a coupon… I spent it and they gave me a voucher… I spent that and they gave me another coupon, plus samples… ah, Lush….. big hugs, girls, big hugs. I heart you all.).

Karl and I also hiked up Baldwin Street, the steepest street in the world according to people who keep track of such things. Yeah, it was pretty steep. While we walked at a leisurely pace, a local guy with understandably great legs was running up and down it, up and down… wow.

On the way back to where I live, I passed… Skylon! Yes, my old Spaceship, now serving some other wanderers. I thought of honking and waving but the people wouldn’t have known what the heck I was on about and I didn’t want to make Bill jealous. It’s okay, Bill… what me and Skylon had was good while it lasted, but it’s over between us. You’re the only vehicle for me now. And you’ve got all wheel drive! That’s something Skylon never had…

The Closest Dunedin Gets to LotR

My House

My Other House

Settlers’ Museum

Dunedin Jail

Railway Station

Kiwi-on-Kiwi

Horse Orthotics

A Penny for your Farthing?

The approach to Baldwin Street

Karl on Baldwin St.

Karl on Baldwin, Part II

View of Dunedin from Signal Hill