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Published: February 9th 2007
Water Race
Some of the old water races left from mining.On the way to Te Taho to catch up with a friend of Dave's. Along the way we stopped at Ross an old gold mining town. We did a walk of water race that was used to supply the gold miners with water the alluvial mining operations. They washed all the silt down the valleys and got it at the bottom, then extracted the gold. The largest gold nugget ever found in NZ was found here, and was 99oz in 1907.
Mark's farm is about 2500ac and he has 500 cow dairy herd. We based ourselves here because Franz Josef and Fox Glacier where only just down the road. Dave had worked for Mark on his dairy farm on the North Island for 2 years and had come down south when they purchased this farm on the West Coast. Dave spent a couple months there playing on the diggers and tractors to help get the land ready for farming.
On the 5th we drove to Franz Josef to book ourselves in for a tour of the glacier and along the way we stopped and took photos with all the other tourists of the Southern Alps. Quite a few of
The Girls
Having a rest after the morning milking. the mountains have snow on them still, which was a nice thing to see again! This part of the coast looks a lot like the Rockies in Canada.
On the 6th we did our tour of the Franz Josef Glacier, we did the walk on the glacier from the face. Unfortunelty we didn't find it that great, we'd expected more then we got with doing that tour and if we did it again we would do the Heli-hike instead. The tour company we went with wasn't very good either, our guide didn't tell us a single thing about the glacier. All they did was get us to where we were going as fast as possible then took us down. All bitching aside though it wasn't all bad, we did get to stand on top of a glacier.
After finishing our glacier tour of Franz we drove to Fox to check out that glacier and went to Lake Matheson. The lake is famous for giving mirror images of Mt. Cook and Mt. Tasmen. Mt. Cook is the tallest mtn in NZ at 3754m and Mt. Tasmen is the second tallest at 3498m. The water wasn't calm enough to get
Whataroa Valley
You can tell it rains a lot when theres moss on the fence posts! Looking towards the Southern Alps. the mirror image but it still provided us with great views. After that we drove back to Mark's for one more night before heading out on the road again.
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