Over the past three days Keith and I did the
Routeburn Track, one of New Zealand's Great Walks and one of the top 11 hiking trails in the world according to National Geographic-so we knew it was going to be good!
We started on Saturday and it was a ridiculously warm and beautiful day! This was our view during lunch on the first day.
More epically gorgeous views!
After a not really hard few hours of hiking we made it to the hut where we would be staying the night, the Routeburn Falls Hut, and it had kind of a good view too...
And here is where everything changes-this is the exact same view at about 8:30 Sunday morning:
If you want to see all the views we were supposed to see I don't doubt that you can google them and find them! On the second day (in theory) we could see to the coast, instead we could see maybe a few hundred meters in front of us! But still it was beautiful-in a different way!
Seeing this ghost of a giant mountain right in front of us made me realize that it is hard to say what all we missed!
In case you can't see the mountain in that pic, the clouds broke-just a little-for us to see it!
We made it to our second hut, the Mackenzie Hut, pretty quickly on Sunday. Once we were there the rain just came down harder and we didn't want to leave!
There are really no pictures from the third day. What we thought was 'raining' on the second day turned out to just be drizzle-we found out what rain in Fiordland National Park means on Monday! Which isn't surprising since the forecast was for 250-350 millimeters (10-13 inches) of rain during Sunday and Monday. All the rain meant hiking was a little harder, because we had A LOT more water to cross! And by water I mean raging waterfalls that yesterday were probably just little trickles coming out of the side of the mountain and a trail that was more creek than trail. But that also means we saw a ton of waterfalls, they were incredible!
So what did the Routeburn feel like? The first day it felt warm, with slightly sore shoulders from the backpack-but in retrospect it felt incredibly lucky! The next two days felt wet-with ice cold water squishing under your toes with every step, and pants that are completely soaked through after being on the trail for five minutes. But they also felt warm, with Keith's hand reaching for mine while we're getting across waterfalls, and the magical warmth of a cup of tea and a fireplace, and the comradery of a dozen strangers laughing at how wet and cold the day is going to be for all of us.
Yeah, the weather kind of sucked, but I would do it again in a heartbeat!
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