The main question about this weekend's adventure was will I or won't I. When we booked the
Kepler Track I was perfectly healthy, but now I was more than a little worried about my bum hand giving me trouble, especially if we got a fraction of the crappy weather we got during the
Routeburn. It wasn't until Wednesday evening that I had finally decided to just suck it up and go and I'm really glad I did!
The Kepler is a little longer than the
Routeburn, well actually almost twice as long, with the Routeburn being 32 kilometers and the Kepler comes in at 60 kilometers. Combine that with the fact that we planned on doing in the same number of days we did the Routeburn-3 days. But Sunday was the only day rain was in the forecast, so hopefully we were going to get lucky.
With a beautiful, warm and sunny day on Friday and the first days hiking not really hard (I mostly kept the whining to a minimum), I was torn between the feelings of wow, this isn't really that hard-I can totally do this and being worried that I was being lulled into a false sense of security by the trail. But the views helped keep my mind off of worrying!
The huts always seems to be set in such beautiful places and the view from the Luxmore Hut was no exception! It had both a great view of Lake Te Anau and a great sunset.
The next morning we got up to a crisp, clear beautiful day without a cloud in the sky-this could not have been more different than the Routeburn! I have no doubt that we appreciated how spectacularly beautiful the hike was a thousand times more than we would have if we hadn't been rained on the whole time last time we tramped!
The second day was the alpine section of the hike and follows mountain ridges almost the whole time. It was a perfect day to be hiking it! The wind kicked up a few times and I realized just how lucky we were with such great weather, any more wind and I think we could have gotten blown off the mountain!
With rain still in the forecast, possibly heavy, we got going pretty early Sunday morning for our last and longest (over 22 kilometers!) part of the hike.
While it was really cloudy we lucked out-again!-and made out without a drop of rain!
It's now Monday and I'm enjoying the best part of tramping-lying around on the sofa doing nothing! This is mostly because I can barely walk, but I think I've earned quite a bit of lazing around time!
No comments:
Post a Comment