Mt. Cook National Park

Mt. Cook

We stayed at a hostel within Mt. Cook National Park boundaries. The visitor center with a view of Mt. Cook was a short walk away. We didn’t do much the first night because we arrived in the late afternoon and it was my cooking group’s turn to make dinner. Afterward, we did watch “The World’s Fastest Indian,” a movie about an older Kiwi man whose dream was to go to Speed Week in the USA to race his motorcycle and his journey to get there. I loved it! The following day, a few of us (Dash, Tommy, Cody, Cobi, Valerie, and Sarah) decided to hike to Mueller hut and stay there overnight. The weather wasn’t great and it was definitely going to be rainy with high winds up top with possible flooding on the trail. We decided to go anyway and two and a half hours in, of nearly straight vertical ascent, Sarah did not feel well and we had to turn back just a half an hour from the top. It was a scary situation as her eyes rolled back into her head and we had to stop and warm her up in the pouring rain. It was probably a good thing to head down though, because we were planning on having an early morning to get down for glacier kayaking. That evening we again watched a movie, this time “Vertical Limit.” In the morning, Christina, Dash, Valerie, Sarah, Cobi, and myself went to Tasman Glacier to kayak and check out some icebergs. Out guides were great, and one of them was actually on the set of Vertical Limit, while the other was really useful for an interview for a report about the Marine Ecology of New Zealand (for class). It was a quite a peaceful experience, but very graphic in contextualizing glacier recession; over the past 30 years, the lake we were kayaking on was created, with an average recession of two football fields a year. Afterward, we met back up with our group and headed out to do the Hooker Valley trail where most of us jumped in the 32degree water for a quick dip. David and I were planning on bouldering nearby but didn’t have the coordination in order to do so unfortunately. All in all, this was (again) a spectacular stop!