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Published: March 19th 2021
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The morning started cold and cloudy. We had our morning pilgrimage down town for our morning coffee and picnic supplies for lunch. We also visited the really good district museum which is a "must see". It shows the tough and unruly lives of those who came here in the early years mainly to seek gold. It seemed that most men would have wasted any gains on booze. There were 18 pubs just for Arrowtown and a whole lot more for Queenstown. It must have been awful. No wonder they brought in the temperance movement. The museum has a fine collection of items from the past and the portrayal of the various types of businesses (papers, bakers, banking, transport, education, supplies etc) was very well done. It's a bit disconcerting to see how many items I could relate to in my lifetime! We sure have moved on in a very short time ---- horses to putting a craft on Mars all in 150years!!
We soon changed out of our shorts and into longs and jackets thinking that since we were heading into the mountain tops we should be better attired. Our journey to Cardrona took us over the very steep and
Love this sheep sculpture
There were merino sheep grazing the slopes of the ski field twisting Crown Range and down to Cardrona. If I thought that was twisting it was nothing compared to the road up to the Cardrona Ski Field. Oh my gosh, I was not happy. 13 kilometres of steep zig zagging metal road. There is a lot of work going on on the road and the area at the bottom of the hill. I would imagine that this area will look vastly different in 5 years time. Houses will have been built making Cardrona a township and hopefully a gondola will have been built to take people up to the ski field. It seemed stupid to drive so far to get up to the top of the range when a gondola could take many straight up as happens in most other countries.
The top of the range opened out to a vast area set up for mountain biking, downhill carting, skiing, snow boarding and jumping. There is a lodge, restaurant, ticket office and a gondola which we took from the carpark to the top of the hill. The cloud had lifted and we could see for miles although there was a cold wind. From here we had a picnic lunch with
a view to die for and then walked to the summit. From the summit you could see far into the distance to the Alps and closer, across the valley to yet another steep winding road to the Snow Park for Cross Country Skiing and Test facilities for new vehicles in winter conditions. Tracks seemed to wind up these hills all around and it seemed amazing to me that they existed at all. The rocks were interesting for me of course. There is green schist (chlorite), mica schist, and a lot of quartz veins, all in contorted and fractured of Otago Schist.
Our walk circuit took us back to the Gondola where we were soon back at the base and driving back down the gravel, steep, zig zagging road to Cardrona. Here we called at the historic Cardrona Hotel for a drink and then on back to Arrowtown. The cloud had lifted and once again it was warm and sunny.
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