There was a small gap in the weather during which Maaike and I skipped off to Mount Owen (topomap).  It’s an interesting place Mount Owen.  Not unlike the burren in the west coast of Ireland – a karst landscape (i.e. limestone exposed to the elements).
We weren’t quite sure what the weather was going to do… but just hoped that the predicted one day of sunshine (or at least, not rain) would fall on the day we wanted to get to the summit.
There is simply heaps of really interesting vegetation on the way up, and it changes constantly as you head up the hill.
The final approach to the hut (where it was just the two of us on the 30th) was up a river… I do enjoy a good scramble up a river :)
The next day we left early ish so that we could hopefully make the most of the weather. It wasn’t looking that promising really to begin with (which was extremely disappointing!) fortunately it cleared pretty quickly. There is a trackish to the summit, but for a lot of the way you’re just following cairns. Mount Owen is not a place to go to in fog.. there are holes everywhere and people die / get into real issues fairly regularly..
We saw these two having a fight (as it turned out – I do love naturewatch.org.nz) on the way up… Also just awesome limestone for scrambling about on. It’s not a simple tramp.. but it is a good one.
The view from the top was spectacular.. really lucky that we had the weather window. We met a couple of German tourists heading up on our way down… when they finally got to the top (after a decent days walking as they’d started at the carpark that morning).. they were rewarded with thick cloud.
We had a lovely evening playing 500 with a couple from Nelson we met in the hut. They were (most) kind and shared their bottle with us to celebrate the new year.
On the way out again the ‘river’ that we’d walked up was now dry (though it was raining). It’s a crazy old place NZ.
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