Mount Aspiring National Park and Wanaka

We loved the Alps so much that we wanted to do another hike to see more of the range before going on to Fiordland. Mount Aspiring is another famous peak in the NZ Alps and we wanted to find a hike that would get us high for some good views. Unfortunately the weather forecast was starting to turn on us...it changes so fast here that it can sometimes be frustrating to try to plan around. The forecast was for 1mm of rain over a period of 6 hours that would start the day we were planning on hiking back out. We figured we'd at least get one good day and a bit of drizzle on the way out so we went for it anyway. Unfortunately, we had a bit of a false start at first - we tried to drive our tiny rental car up the 30km+ gravel road to the carpark but we had to ford 9 rivers along the way. Fortunately, most of the rivers were low enough that we could blaze right through - until the second to last one. We were ALMOST there but this river was about at the bottom of our car doors and we thought that stalling and flooding our rental car in the middle of nowhere was not a good idea (not to mention voiding our rental insurance agreement). In the end we turned around and hired a 4x4 van to take us there the next morning.

Once there our plan was to find a camp spot in the valley, drop off our heavy stuff and then hike up to French ridge for a view with light day packs. The first two hours of the hike we travelled through private farmland (side note: most of the public park land is accessed through private farm land. It was explained to us that the farmers' land leases were up and in their re-negotiations with the government they were required to return some land back to the public for park use and must allow road access - pretty cool!). We walked through the most amazing farm land surrounded by towering mountains. These fields were all actively being farmed and were filled with hundreds of cows; turns out cows can be quite feisty!

Once in the park, we continued through this amazing valley for another couple of hours. Although it was cloudy, we still had some great views of glaciers and waterfalls.

We looked for a camp spot by the river but there were so many sandflies that we decided to keep going (sandflies are like black flies; they bite, they hurt and they are very annoying).

The final two hours up to French Ridge is hard. It's 1000m straight up a rocky and muddy track with conveniently placed tree roots as steps and handholds. It was so steep that we thought it should be classified as a whole new type of climbing - "Rootineering"? or "Treeineering"? Either way - it was pretty full on using all four limbs. Once we got to the top of the ridge we decided to camp instead of staying in the hut since we ended up hauling all our gear up just to avoid the sandlies. The clouds cleared a bit and we were able to get some amazing views of glaciers and the steep valleys in the area.

Our spot may have been sandfly free but definitely not Kea free! We were visited at our campsite by about twenty Kea's. At first they were super fun to interact with.

They are incredibly smart and curious (click HERE to see a video of one checking Tom out). However they got pretty annoying once we started making dinner. They would sneak up on you while you're not looking to either peck at something, try to steal your socks, or just play with the guy wires on the tent.

The weather started turning on us with a few showers over dinner and into the evening, as expected. Sometime in the middle of the night though, we were hit with some high winds and pretty hard rain! When we woke up in the morning the wind and rain were still going pretty hard and at this point we realized the forecast we read of 1mm of rain over a 6 hour period was wrong. It was going to be much much more than that! We packed up our tent around 5:30am, and headed into the hut for breakfast before hiking back down in the pouring rain through the steep muddy track that had turned into a waterfall.

Needless to say we were completely soaked...Luckily the rain stopped while we were hiking back through the valley and the sun came out just enough for us to dry off a bit.

The next day, we joined the locals in Wanaka at their farm fair. They had a lot of vendors (jewellery, clothing, food, furs, farming equipment), livestock competitions, horse jumping competitions, and a sheep dog herding competiton. Its great when we randomly stumble on these local events!

Click here for more photos!