Mt. Cook

What a day.. In fact, what a great weekend. Well, ok, Saturday wasn’t great – headed up to Porter Heights to go snow boarding. Much against the advice of Warick and Co – who explained that as a norwesterly was coming through it’d be far too windy. Ahh well, an hour and a half drive later we found that he was totally right :) However, I did get to meet up with my friend Emma Towey who works there – hopefully get up there again before I leave NZ.

But bettern’ sat was today (Sunday!) when I headed off on a 3 hour flight around Mt. Cook with pilot Leo (friend of Dave Humes), Till and a friend of Leos (Brian)

So after pulling the plane out of the hanger it was time to fill up with petrol..

It was a totally stunning day – hard to describe.. I’m only going to put a couple of pics up – but there’s a whole slideshow here. Really worth a look even if I do say so myself. We flew from ChCh up over Methven (where Mt. Hutt skifield is) and headed on up over some stunning scenery..

towards Mount Cook. Here you can see a pic of one of the many braided rivers that you get in NZ.

At the end of the last glaciation, 10,000 years ago, rivers carried alluvial outwash down the valleys of the east coast and deposited it to form flat basins between the mountains and coastal plains.

Apparently only North America and the Himalayas have such extensive braided rivers systems.. anyway.. they sure are purty to look at :)

There were so many examples of the extensive impact the glaciers have on the Southern Alps – here you can see a moraine on the way up towards Mt. Cook. Still, like everywhere else, the glaciers are retreating..

I’ve put a short (3meg) video of mount cook here us flying past the summit. In this next picture you can see the summit ridge is quite long and flat – the actual summit is on the left hand side of the picture.

Then we landed at a place called Glentanner (by the top of lake tekapo) and had lunch. It was good to sit and just relax for an hour – I think it made the return flight more enjoyable than doing the whole thing in one go. I was glad of getting sustenance.. as on the way back Leo asked me did I want to fly for a bit (once we were safely in the air.. funnily enough)

Not really sure how far I flew – perhaps a hundred km or so – … the updraught / turbulence over the mountains was a tiny bit scary – but *nothing* compared to the bouncing around we were doing before coming in to land for lunch.. that really was .. exciting (to say the least)

We then flew up over Ashburton and up the coast, over the banks peninsula and over ChCh itself. You can see our house from the air (circled in red).. you can see just how run down it is (and the big patch of earth outside is where they lifted up a house and took it away).. but also look at the river running by the bottom of our big garden. Sure the place is freezing – but what a house – what a home? it is.

Finally a word on pilots’ senses of humour.. after 9/11 – well may 12th 2005 according to this article a Cessna plane (tiny) strayed over restricted DC airspace and caused a panic (F16s (not tiny) were scrambled).. anyway – here’s a bumper ish sticker that was in the office..

Well I thought it was funny.. Anyway – thanks to Leo for a truly amazing flight – do check out the slideshow here… there were just too many pics to put up on this post.