Kepler Track Day One

Last Wednesday, Dave left Dunedin on a bus with a Rotary Club group to walk the Kepler track, one of New Zealand's "Great Walks." I would call it a serious hike, not a walk: 67 km (41 miles) in three and a half days, with a vertical rise up (mostly in the first day) and down (mostly in the second day) of somewhere around 1000 meters. The Department of Conservation has "huts" where the hikers sleep on bunk beds with foam mattresses, but they carry in their food and sleeping bags. They rode a bus four hours to get to Te Anau, spent the night there in relative comfort, then walked about six hours on Thursday. The walk began with about an hour and a half along the lakeshore of Lake Te Anau, then up hill through bush (woods) for a while, then uphill above the tree line for the rest of the way. Here's a map that shows the track in red:

Below is the view back on Te Anau from the uphill part of the track that is still in the woods.

After the big rock face in the photo above, they finally got above the tree line.

In the photo below, that highest point in the distance is Mount Luxmore, and the hut for the first night is located on the flanks of that mountain. The photo below was taken about 3 hours into the hike.

The photos below show Lake Te Anau in the distance. That's where they started.

The grasses in the photo below are called tussock, and tussock is common on the hills all over the South Island.

I thought "walk" was the wrong word to describe this hike, and I think "hut" is the wrong word to describe the building where they slept. The hut sleeps 40 and has LPG for cooking (which is helicoptered in) and solar lights that worked for about two hours after sunset. They got up in the dark and had no light in the morning. These huts are reserved months or even a year in advance.

The Department of Conservation has a person who lives at the hut for eight days at a time, and after the group arrived at the hut, she took them up above it for an orientation.