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As I described in the previous post, to get to Doubtful Sound we drove four hours, rode across Lake Manapouri in a boat for an hour, then crossed a mountain pass in a bus, which took another hour. Near the top of the pass, they stopped the bus and let us pile out to take photos of this first glance of Doubtful Sound from about 2000 feet above the sound.
We drove down, down, down on a road with a gradient of one in five to the dock you can see below, where we got on a boat. The bus on the dock is one of three busses that brought people over the pass from Lake Manapouri.
The next two photos are taken from the same place. This is the only spot in Doubtful Sound where you can see out to the open ocean and also see back to Wilmot Pass that we came over. In the second photo, look for the notch in the hills in the background. That's Wilmot Pass.
Below is another photo with Wilmot Pass visible. It's one of about 50 pictures I took of the beautiful mountains, stacked up, gray on gray. I'll spare you the other 49, but I was entranced with the shapes.
The boat took us into one of the arms of the sound, then out toward the mouth. The photo below shows the mouth of the Sound.
As we approached the mouth of the sound, we could see the rocks that shelter the sound. Beyond those rocks is the open ocean, the Tasman Sea. The boat went briefly out into the Tasman. The swells were huge, and I immediately turned green. I was grateful we didn't stay out there very long or I would have been very sick.
The rocks at the mouth of Doubtful Sound are covered with New Zealand fur seals, as you can see on the next photo. We also saw a fjordland crested penguin, a small light colored dot on a different rock, which Dave could make out pretty clearly with his binoculars. We also saw blue penguins swimming in a group near the mouth of the sound.
Because of my propensity to get motion sick, I stayed on the outdoor deck the whole trip. People kept coming up to keep me company from time to time. The next photo shows me with Carol, our friend who was visiting from the US.
On the way back toward the dock, they cruised into one of the arms of the sound and turned off the engine. The next photo shows the place where we stopped. They asked people not to walk around and not to take photos, so everyone could enjoy the silence. It was amazing. We could hear the wind on the waves and birds in the trees a long distance away. Pristine, primordial silence.
We got to see a few waterfalls. It rains most days at Doubtful Sound, so we were really lucky that all we had were clouds that day (especially me, who stayed outside the whole time). Because it wasn't raining, we didn't see a lot of waterfalls, but below is one of the tallest ones we saw. Because there is almost no topsoil, when it rains the water rushes off the hills in waterfalls, and when the rain stops, the waterfalls stop pretty much immediately.
There was a naturalist on the boat who explained a lot of things. One of the most interesting was learning about tree avalanches. The fjords were carved by the last ice age, leaving bare rock. Very little soil has accumulated, so the trees are growing precariously. If a tree gets sodden and heavy, it falls down, crashing into the trees below it. They uproot, fall, and create an avalanche of trees. We saw a lot of them, or more accuately, we saw the results of a lot of them. In the photo below you can see how the avalanche was started by one tree at the top, then widened as the trees crashed into trees below.
The next photo shows two tree avalanches. The one on the right is about three years old, the naturalist said, and you can see the moss starting to grow on it. He said the one on the left was less than a week old.
Below are a few more views of tree avalanches at various points on Doubtful Sound.
Some wonderful friends from the U.S. recently came to visit, and we took the opportunity to go on a trip to Doubtful Sound, one of about a half dozen fjords on the west coast of the South Island. You've probably heard of Milford Sound, the easiest fjord to get to and thus the best known. Doubtful Sound is the only other fjord that can be reached from the east, but it's definitely complicated to get there, involving a boat ride across a lake and a bus ride across a mountain pass. To start our trip, we drove a couple hours southwest from Dunedin on the most gorgeous day. Then we turned west and drove another two hours, watching the mountains get closer and closer. Below is what we saw as we approached the mountains and the lake.
We stayed in a cottage in the small town of Manapouri, right on the edge of Lake Manapouri, the gateway to Doubtful Sound. After we arrived, Dave spent a couple hours doing a lovely painting of the lake.
It stayed clear into the evening, and we had a wonderful time watching the sun set over the lake.
You can hopefully see from the map below the challenge of getting to Doubtful Sound. Manapouri is on the right hand side of the map. From Manapouri, you take a one-hour boat ride across Lake Manapouri. At the west end of the lake there’s a gravel road, marked in red on the map, across Wilmot Pass (about 2,000 feet high) that drops down to Doubtful Sound. The road was built to bring equipment to the power station on the west end of the lake. The turbines and other equipment was brought by boat into Doubtful Sound and then trucked (very slowly) over the slippery, muddy pass. At the east end of Doubtful Sound we got on a boat which took us all the way out to the ocean, the Tasman Sea. We were on the boat about three hours, then took the bus back over the pass to have a tour of the power station and take the boat back across Lake Manapouri.
The boat ride across Lake Manipouri was beautiful because of the clear weather. The lake has quite a few islands in it, and the next few shots show the views from the boat as we crossed the lake.
In that previous photo, you can see Dave with our friend, Steve. Note how Dave is a bit hunched over. It was FREEZING on the outdoor deck of the boat. It was a cold day with a strong wind. Because I get motion sick, I always stay outside on boats. I had on four layers that day and was still chilly, but I was so absorbed in the views that it didn't matter.
The last photo on Lake Manipouri (below) shows the power station at the west end of the lake. In the background are the mountains we would cross in a bus to get to Doubtful Sound. You can see the clouds clustered to the west over Doubtful Sound. Our beautiful clear weather ended here, and the rest of the trip was in clouds. Those mountains in this photo are a rainforest, and we were really lucky on Doubtful Sound because it didn't rain. Doubtful Sound will be in the next post.
This power station is fascinating because it generates hydro power without a dam, probably New Zealand's greatest engineering feat. Holes were drilled through the rock down to the level of Doubtful Sound, which is about 800 feet below the level of the lake. The water flowing downhill to the sound turns 7 huge turbines. This hydro power station was built in the 1960s primarily to power the aluminum smelter near Invercargill, and 85% of its power goes there, providing lots of jobs for the south end of the South Island. There was a huge controversy when the power station was built because some water from nearby rivers has to be diverted into Lake Manapouri to keep the level of the lake high enough.
We drove down, down, down on a road with a gradient of one in five to the dock you can see below, where we got on a boat. The bus on the dock is one of three busses that brought people over the pass from Lake Manapouri.
The next two photos are taken from the same place. This is the only spot in Doubtful Sound where you can see out to the open ocean and also see back to Wilmot Pass that we came over. In the second photo, look for the notch in the hills in the background. That's Wilmot Pass.
Below is another photo with Wilmot Pass visible. It's one of about 50 pictures I took of the beautiful mountains, stacked up, gray on gray. I'll spare you the other 49, but I was entranced with the shapes.
The boat took us into one of the arms of the sound, then out toward the mouth. The photo below shows the mouth of the Sound.
As we approached the mouth of the sound, we could see the rocks that shelter the sound. Beyond those rocks is the open ocean, the Tasman Sea. The boat went briefly out into the Tasman. The swells were huge, and I immediately turned green. I was grateful we didn't stay out there very long or I would have been very sick.
The rocks at the mouth of Doubtful Sound are covered with New Zealand fur seals, as you can see on the next photo. We also saw a fjordland crested penguin, a small light colored dot on a different rock, which Dave could make out pretty clearly with his binoculars. We also saw blue penguins swimming in a group near the mouth of the sound.
Because of my propensity to get motion sick, I stayed on the outdoor deck the whole trip. People kept coming up to keep me company from time to time. The next photo shows me with Carol, our friend who was visiting from the US.
On the way back toward the dock, they cruised into one of the arms of the sound and turned off the engine. The next photo shows the place where we stopped. They asked people not to walk around and not to take photos, so everyone could enjoy the silence. It was amazing. We could hear the wind on the waves and birds in the trees a long distance away. Pristine, primordial silence.
We got to see a few waterfalls. It rains most days at Doubtful Sound, so we were really lucky that all we had were clouds that day (especially me, who stayed outside the whole time). Because it wasn't raining, we didn't see a lot of waterfalls, but below is one of the tallest ones we saw. Because there is almost no topsoil, when it rains the water rushes off the hills in waterfalls, and when the rain stops, the waterfalls stop pretty much immediately.
There was a naturalist on the boat who explained a lot of things. One of the most interesting was learning about tree avalanches. The fjords were carved by the last ice age, leaving bare rock. Very little soil has accumulated, so the trees are growing precariously. If a tree gets sodden and heavy, it falls down, crashing into the trees below it. They uproot, fall, and create an avalanche of trees. We saw a lot of them, or more accuately, we saw the results of a lot of them. In the photo below you can see how the avalanche was started by one tree at the top, then widened as the trees crashed into trees below.
The next photo shows two tree avalanches. The one on the right is about three years old, the naturalist said, and you can see the moss starting to grow on it. He said the one on the left was less than a week old.
Below are a few more views of tree avalanches at various points on Doubtful Sound.
