Mount Cook, Icebergs and Global Warming

Well someone had been listening to our prayers as the day dawned bright and crisp.  Blue skies, puffy clouds here and there and a slight chill in the shade; but in the sun, a lovely warmth.  Not many people know this, but the NZ sun is inhumanly strong.  Remember all the stuff we've pumped into the atmosphere that has made a nice hole in the ozone layer, well that hole sits plum on top of God's garden and if you're not careful you can get a nice dose of UVA/B just by sitting around for 15 minutes.

We packed up Babette and I checked to see if the rabbits had eaten the carrot I had left for them; clearly we had no Bugs Bunnies around as the lovingly sliced chunks were still lying there ignored.  Then we were on the road and after one false start of driving in the wrong direction, we managed to get on the right road.  Over and over again we (or I) have bored you with how delightful driving through this country is.  Well, Mount Cook and the surrounding areas didn't come up short either.  Last night had been pitch black, but now in the bright sunshine, some of the views we had as we drove along were incredible.

Come on.....I dare ANYONE to say that's not a road you'd like to drive down!

Mount Cook and his Cloud Duvet

As usual, looking chic for a mountain hike :)

Mount Cook rose up in the distance.  Normally the peak is covered in a cap of cloud, but today we had been graced with a wonderfully clear sight of the summit.  The surrounding peaks, including Mount Tasman, were doing an admirable job of keeping the encroaching cloud cover at bay.  It almost looked like a giant white duvet had been pulled back and was pegged there by the mountains.

We were heading towards the village that takes its name from the mountain.  Aoraki, or "Cloud Piercer" aka Mount Cook, is 3,754m high, though the village is only at an elevation of around 765m.....all those numbers seem a bit meaningless and when you see the mountain; it looks rather large. But somehow in the clear, crisp air and surrounded by all those indomitably huge cliffs and brother mountains, Aoraki doesn't seem quite so high.  When you consider that 22 of the country's 27 mountains that are over 3000m tall are in the Mount Cook National Park, well, everything is relative and Aoraki's relatives make him seem less imposing than he is.

If we went to the moon....the photo might look like this

Then you realise the difference between 3754 and 765 is nearly 3000....and those numbers are metres....and 3000m is 3 bloody KMs!!!  Yup, you'd be walking a fair way directly up into the air before you hit the top of the mountain and clearly the sides are not vertical.  Of course, it's not the tallest mountain in the world, but there aren't many that are so beautifully visible from base to peak.

As you can see I am clearly bigger than a mountain

Ok, enough about a damned mountain.  We were here to do a little sight-seeing of a lovely lake that was formed by the melting of what used to be a big glacier.  Now of course with all the evil global warming taking place, it's not so big and the lake is getting ever bigger.  Only a few days before we arrived there had been a huge shearing of the glacier and so we had arrived at an auspicious moment - auspicious in the sense that we got to see some of the biggest icebergs that had ever been dumped into the lake by the glacial melting.

The bergs were rather large and so very beautiful

Funny though, when you're sat on a lake at the end of a glacier and you look around at the almost agrophobically big scene around you, the whole "human impact/global warming" discussion seems kind of pointless.  Fact is, we're in an interglacial period that has lasted for 11,600 years.  We're due a "freeze" or another glacial period in the next few thousand years.  Each time that happens - from interglacial to glacial - there is a short term rise then a long term dip in temperatures.


Now we might be accelerating or tipping the balance somehow, who knows and maybe it's best we don't dick with the world's thermostats.  However, honestly speaking, when you look at the power and might of nature you realise one thing, an Ice Age would be terminal for the human species and though it might be unnatural, so is modern medicine and the prolongation of life/cure for cancer etc.  Surely nobody is going to argue we should stop treating sick people and let nature run its course?  No.  Further, can you imagine the gnashing of teeth in the global media if we had been globalised back between 1550 and 1850, when for 300 years we suffered a mini Ice-Age and glaciers were growing, temperatures dropped and icebergs roamed ALL the world's oceans?  That was purely a natural occurrence, but humans being humans and blame culture being our "go-to" point of view, well, I am sure we would have burned a few clever women as witches and strengthened the grip of a few very powerful cults (aka religions) had we been aware of what was going on.  Oh......we did.

Speaking of dinosaurs....look at this primordial fly!

Anyhow, like I say, looking at the scenery seemed to hammer home how pointless and irrelevant we are in terms of other major catastrophes (like meteors annihilating the world's dinosaurs and changing weather patterns for millions of years) and that perhaps more of the world's "eco-taxes" should just be spent on making people's lives better.  Charging me a few hundred quid to either land or take off from an airport doesn't seem to be changing the world's temperatures and I am sure our governments aren't using that money to pay the monthly bill from Mother Nature to stop global warming!

I shall now dismount from my high horse and put my soap-box away.

So as you have guessed we were on a trip up to a lake (Tasman) which is fed by the Tasman and Hooker Glaciers.  We drove out and decanted onto a mountain path, then walked 20 minutes or so until a lunar vista opened up and we saw a barren and rock strewn landscape in front of us.  This had been the glacial bed pre-melt and the moraine left looked untouched by human hands.  It was so peaceful, so graceful.  The lake itself was a wonderful milky colour and the icebergs themselves so varied.


We learned that the accordionisation of the bergs, where it looks like they have folds in them, happens when the top of the berg melts slightly and then it rolls over to maintain the 10% above the waterline.  This then produces rings of thinner iceberg and new rolls of thicker ice underneath.  It's really quite beautiful to see.

The water is insanely cold.  We tried dipping our hands into the water (2 degrees Celsius) and wow......after 7 seconds your fingers were numb, 3 seconds later they were in pain .....I didn't try much longer than that!  Funny, back in the day, we went Canyoning in Interlaken and the water there had been 4 degrees and we had swum through it in wetsuits.  Again we couldn't really put our fingers in it and had to hold our hands out of the water when we swam (which looks weird!), but those 2 degrees extra clearly make a huge difference.

Our boat buzzed around the lake, allowing us to take photos and the guide taught us a lot about how the glacier and subsequently the lake formed.  Then back to the bus and back to Babette.  We drove back out of the valley and by now the sun was on its speedy descent behind the mountains and we were treated to yet more natural beauty brought to you by New Zealand Beautiful Views Inc.

The drive to Grumpys Campsite (great name) was through some very different almost desert-like mountainscape.  The road wound this way and that and the sunset produced some of the most incredible colours and shades across the country.  The trees at the side of the road were turning golden in the onset of Autumn and in an unspoken acknowledgement to this being the second last sunset drive, we both drank in the views.  Julia was busy snapping away and even ran to the back of Babette, opened the window and tried to capture the sun setting over the mountains behind us.

The first house in 300km to remind us of home!

By the time we got to Grumpys it was dark, but luckily, Grumpy was a lovely old man who showed us to our spot and we settled in for the night, smiling from ear to ear.  It had been a fantastic day in the Mount Cook National Park and we had seen and learned some marvellous things.

Best of all though, tomorrow was going to be a rafting day....a real rafting day.  Honest to God Grade 5 rapids and just to whet your appetite, we had our scariest raft EVER on the Rangitata River.