What weekends are made of

Friday afternoon Hillary rolled into Dunedin on the nakedbus, only to receive the greeting "so glad you're here! We're going backpacking. for the weekend. starting right now." Carried by our rental van, Voltron, we set out for a couple days away from academia.

Mt. Cook is New Zealand's tallest peak. It's surrounded by glaciers and national park and it's nigh impossible to get a bad view of it. As we approached our trail, each photo stop was better than the last, filled with rugged and ever more present mountaintops and their accompanying ice falls.

We hiked into the Hooker Valley on Friday night, set up camp, and crashed shortly after dinner. During the night I woke up a couple of times to what sounded like thunder in a cloudless sky, but was most likely glaciers calving or settling, as the valley was ornamented with frozen-bed glaciers high up on the walls and peaks.

The next morning we trekked in a bit further, passing kias (alpine parrots that are notorious for chewing the rubber off car windows), "poky bitch plants" (more than one of our number bled from more than one stab wound on more than one occasion), a proglacial lake riddled with stagnant ice and icebergs. Our resting place at high noon became our second campsite, looking up the valley at the entire Hooker Glacier and over at its toe calving into the lake. Actually, it didn't calve as much as we wanted it to.

For the remainder of the afternoon we meandered up the valley for more phenomenal views sitting on fresh moraines, a short walk up to a waterfall, brief moments of investigation into the tiny fruits that someone dubbed "alpine pomegranates," and general geogasms and disbelief that we were surrounded with such present mountains and glaciers. Upon our return to camp we pushed some big rocks down a steep slope and sat watching the glacier until it got dark. It looked like it was about to lose a bus-sized chunk into the lake but it never did.

Dinner both nights was followed shortly by boxed wine, so easy to pack out. Only one blister this time! New Zealand scenery is breathtaking. we drove just 4 hours, hiked less than 10k, encountered only three other people on the trail, and interacted with only one of them.

Queenstown next weekend?