Ah, beautiful mountains...there's no shortage of them around Mount Cook National Park! It took us about an hour to drive there from the town of Twizel (pronounced "TWY-zel"), and what a drive. We hiked in the Hooker Valley to get a spectacular view of Mt. Cook, passing flowers and glacial streams and lakes along the way. One interesting thing (of many) about the valley is the way the mountains seem to simply rise straight from the valley floor, instead of gradually creeping upwards into mountainhood.
We also went boating on the terminal lake of the Tasman Glacier, a lake that literally did not exist when Laurie visited New Zealand with her family in 1985. The retreat of the glacier over the last 15 years has carved out a lake that is now something like 180 meters deep and respectably large. The water is freezing, melting from the glacier as it does, and opaque from the rock flour. The glacier calved an iceberg into the lake just before we stepped into the boats, causing waves. We boated up to the foot of the glacier, skirting icebergs and watching rocks melt out of the ice and plop into the water. We even got to walk on a very large iceberg...don't expect we'll get to do that again anytime soon!
