With a few good days of weather, Marie and I headed into the heart of the southern alps to visit Mt. Cook Village. At the turn of the century this "village" was no more than a hotel and a place where mountaineers would start their journey to climb the highest mountain in New Zealand. Within spitting distance of the Hooker and Mueller glaciers, Mt.Cook looms over the entire valley with its summit at 3724m.
To really get the best experience of the area, we decided to spend the night at the Meuller hut in the Sealy Range which has a spectaular view of Mt. Cook and the surrounding peaks. We started out right from the campsite in the Mt. Cook village and hiked pretty much straight up for about 1000m to the hut site at around 1800m. The entire way we had amazing views of Mt. Cook, Mt. Sifton and the 24km long Hooker Glacier. The scale of these glaciers is beyond words, with some of the largest lateral morains I have ever seen.
From the Mueller hut we had amazing views of the large ice-fall off of Mt. Sifton which was incredibly active. All afternoon and night we were watching large seracs breaking off and falling hundreds of meters below. It was very difficult to get any idea of the scale of the large blocks of ice actually breaking off, but based on the noise I'd guess that they were at least house sized.
We spent a few hours watching the clouds litterally spill over Mt. Sifton and the continental divide. Click here to check out a time-lapse video we took.
Up at the hut we also had our first encounter with New Zealand's Kea - the worlds only alpine parrot. Around dinner time a whole flock of about 10 of them showed up and provided loads of entertainment. These birds are the most curious of any wild bird I have ever seen. The whole group seemed to stick together and would fly around checking out what was going on around the campsite. The interesting thing is that for the most part they just seemed curious at what was going on around the hut and campsite. They did seem to be a bit destructive though as they would all home in on a tent and proceed to litterally start to chew and pull apart anything they could get at. Its a wonder that the Mueller hut is still standing since they really seemed to be intent on trying to remove the radio antenna and any loose trim they could manage to pull off.
The next day we walked to the Hooker glacier which is periodically calving large chunks of ice into the lake that exists at its terminus. Of course I couldn't resist trying to swim in the lake and get to one of the small ice bergs. I eventually did manage to snag a little one - needless to say, the lake was a bit on the cold side.
Being the highest mountain in the Southern Alps it also gets hit by pretty severe storms. With an impending change in the weather we captured a pretty cool time-lapse video of the clouds moving over the Mt. Cook summit. Click here to view the video.
Beautiful!
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