Kepler Track Day Two

When they got up on Friday morning, they found that the valley with Lake Te Anau in it was full of clouds, but they were above the clouds in the sunshine. About half of the second day of the Kepler is up high on ridges. Then the second half of the day is the steep walk down. Most of the photos Dave took are from the high walk along the ridges.

Yes, the path in the next photo is the trail they're going to walk on.

The daisies in the the next photo are called Mountain Daisies. They have stiff leaves like a succulent plant, and they are the iconic flower of the Kepler Track.

The next photo looks back on the route they've been walking. The highest peak in the far distance is Mount Luxmore.

After several hours of walking, they came to the downhill section. There were several series of steps. The people coming up the steps in the next photo are walking the Kepler in the opposite direction, so they were coming up. You can see the river far below. That's where the hut for the second night was, so they had to walk all the way down to it.

Below is the hut for the second night, back down out of the mountains, beside a river.

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.

a creative mailbox

Dave's birthday

On Dave's birthday, New Year's Day, he got invited to go fishing with his good friend Nick and Nick's father-in-law. They drove south two hours to the Mataura River. It was super windy, so Dave could hardly fly fish but he tried. Nick was fishing with bait and caught a wonderful trout.

Murder's Beach

There's a beach near Dunedin called Murder's Beach. I don't know how it got its name, but I'd heard from several people it was beautiful. So the other day after dinner, Dave and I took advantage of the long evening light to go and find it. Here's a view from above.

Here's another view from above, with the obligatory sheep in the foreground.

And here's a view of the gravel road we had to drive down to get to the beach, with our wonderful Honda in the foreground. One of the amazing things about South Island beaches is how often you are the only person there.

We didn't get any good shots of the beach from close up, because the clouds got heavier and there wasn't good light. But we took a detour on the way to the beach and got a wonderful view of the mouth of Otago Harbour. The beach in the view below is Aramoana Beach. On Dave's first day in Dunedin, a friend drove us out to see that beach, and we've never been back. We'll need to remedy that.

The next photo shows the view just left of the previous photo. That's Taiaroa Head with its funny little lighthouse poking up. Below the lighthouse, on those cliffs, is where the albatrosses nest, the only albatross breeding area that's on any kind of mainland. From that viewpoint, with Dave's binoculars we could see albatrosses wheeling around the headland. That gives you an idea of how big those birds are.

Cargill's Castle

Here's one more picture from the top of Flagstaff. Somewhere on the hill in the background, near that stand of trees right in the middle of the photo on the bluff above the ocean, Dave could see the ruins of a big old house, which he knew was called Cargill's castle. It's in ruins now. A few nights after Dave climbed up Flagstaff, and he and I set off to try to find the ruins. It's clearly marked on the map, and we could see it as we came up over a hill in the car.

The ruin is nestled among modern houses. The map showed two different paths to get to the ruin, but we couldn't find either of them. We drove to the end of a road, where we could see the castle behind some trees when we looked left. You can see it behind Dave. When we looked right, there was a wonderful view down the coast. We figured we'll have to ask at the tourist information center in town to find out how to get to it.

Flagstaff

Dave's training for one of the New Zealand "great walks" he's going to take in a couple of weeks. These "great walks" are what I would call strenuous hikes. He walked up to the top of Mount Cargill the other day, then a few days later to the top of Flagstaff, the second highest point around Dunedin. Here he is, near the top.

In the next photo, he's looking toward Mount Cargill, the tallest peak around at 660 meters (2165 feet). It's to the left in the photo.

The next photo is a view of Dunedin. The long body of water in the foreground is the Otago Harbour. If you go left down the harbor, you'll come to the ocean. You can also see the ocean in the background.

One more photo of the view from the top.