Mount Cook and the Tasman Glacier

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After Dunedin, I went on my way to Mount Cook, the highest mountain in New Zealand at 3755 metres. On the way, I stopped at the "clay cliffs", some impressive cliffs that are actually situated on private property. Mount Cook is reached via a road along a big lake and through some amazing mountain scenery. The village itself is, like Milford Sound, just a couple of houses and hotels where people live to accommodate for the tourists. Most of the time, Mount Cook is covered in clouds, and this was also the case when I arrived. I booked a morning tour to the Tasman Glacier (yes, Dutch sea farer Abel Tasman was named after many things in NZ!), which is, I think, the biggest glacier in New Zealand.

It was a nice 18-20 degrees when we went out to the glacier. We had a 20 minute bus ride through beautiful scenery, actually the bedding of where the glacier was several hundreds of years ago. From where we were dropped off, it was another 20 minute walk to the lake. We had to walk over a big pile of rocks, which was pushed there by the glacier. Once we got to the top of the rocks, the temperature suddenly fell several degrees. Not sure how many, but I estimate about 5 degrees. That was a strange but interesting feeling.

At the bottom of the glacier, a lake has formed very recently and is only 25 years old. It's huge though, and there are big icebergs floating around in it. You can navigate the lake with a boat and a guide, which was the main event on my tour. We cruised in between the icebergs, some of them very big. Knowing that only 10% of the icebergs actually sticks out from the water, the icebergs are almost 10 times as big! The end of the glacier itself, is a rocky mess and it hardly looks like ice. We were also lucky to get a glimpse of Mount Cook as the clouds moved away from it's peak for a moment. Photo-op! The lake we were at, was at about 750m above sea level, so the mountain was sticking out above us at another 3km! It's hard to believe from the pictures, and it was kind of an optical illusion when I looked up to it. It seemed so easy to reach, but it's a 4 day hike up there, and Sir Edmund Hillary (the first man to climb Mt Everest), said it was one of the hardest mountains he had climbed.

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Comments

[Rancherita]

nice photo!