Routeburn and Rockslides - South Island Trip Part 3
With the morning came the third leg of the South Island journey, Routeburn track. We packed up, did a sweep of the campsite, and we were on the trailhead by 10:45. About an hour in, we hit Key Summit. Key Summit is an hour and a half long side hike that rewards you with 360 views of the Remarkables, the Southern Alps, and Lake Marian if you look down. The clouds cleared just as we got to the top, and the pond resting on top only added to the view. Continuing on the trail we passed lodges with solar powered everything for people with $1500 to spend on a 3 day hiking tour (we were being ambitious when we decided to tackle the trip in two days). After getting past that, we made it to our campsite at Lake McKenzie and set up our tent on one of the green felt squares the Department of Conservation set up. It felt kind of like a Boy Scout camp.
We made good time getting to the campsite, so we had a lot of clock to burn before the end of the day. My roommate and I decided to do a little exploring and decided to see what’s on the other side of the lake. There hadn’t been rain in a couple of weeks and the stream bed/rock slide that feeds the lake was dried up. It led up to a bowl where the ridge curled back on itself and we decided to see if we could get up there. It was a crazy rock scramble and it got steep at times, but it was a lot of fun and definitely a good workout. We made it to the bowl fast and then we got more ambitious. The ridge was right in front of us, straight up, but right in front of us, and we decided we were going to get to the top of that ridge. Up until this point we had been following cairns left by other ambitious hikers, but as we started climbing to the ridge, those cairns stopped. The hike got a lot scarier very quickly. It wasn’t steep anymore, it was straight up. The views were incredible and sobering as we realized how much elevation we were gaining and how small the lake we were camping at now looked. We hit our drop dead turnaround time, and the ridgeline wasn’t getting any closer. As much as I hated to do it, we made the call to turn around. The next step was figuring out how to get down. Getting down was exponentially more dangerous than going up. One false move and that was it, and we were deathly aware of it. There was thick grass that grew on the slope that we used as hand holds. It tore at our hands, but it was much better than the alternative. As we started heading down, the fog started rolling in, and I was satisfied with the decision to turn around. Getting down was dangerous enough. I don’t even want to think about what getting down with 0 visibility would have been like.
The cold air mixed with our warm breath soaked the inside our tent and we woke up at 3:00am cold and wet. It was a full moon with no cloud coverage, and we decided to do a moonlight night hike. We started on the trail at 3:30 in the morning and when we broke tree line, the views illuminated by the moon were haunting. Coming around to the other side of the ridge, the views opened up to Hollyford Valley and extended all the way to the Tasman Sea. We hit the high point, Harris Saddle, at around 5am, and passed Harris Lake right around sunrise. It was surreal because I’m used to finishing a hike in the evening, so the sun perched part way in the sky kept tricking me into thinking it was evening. Since we left so early, we ended up lapping one of the groups doing the trip in 3 days that started a day before us. Their faces were priceless when we rolled into their campsite at 730 in the morning. The trail out from their campsite was well maintained and relatively flat, which was nice because it let me take in Routeburn Flats’s views.
After crossing the long suspension bridge to the trail end, we drove into town and got breakfast at a local café in Glenorchy. On our way into town, we got stuck behind a man on horse driving his flock of sheep down the road. It was arguably the most quintessentially New Zealand thing I’ve seen to date. Glenorchy made the average small town look like a city. There were maybe 5 roads, a general store, and a one room school house entitled “School.” I don’t know if it was the small town charm or the fact that I’d been largely surviving on apples, peanut butter, and trail mix for the past week, but the bacon and egg frittata I had was one of the best breakfasts I’ve ever had. We drove back to Routeburn to pick up the girls and got a nice two hour nap in the car before they showed up. Back in Glenorchy we headed to our bach, a vacation home we rented for the night and spent the rest of the day drying out our tents, cleaning our clothes, finally showering (you have no idea how needed this way) and reading. The bach was essentially a really funky tin shed that someone made livable and it was even used in the movie Vertical Limit. Besides a cat sneaking in and jumping on my face at night, it was a great place to unwind after a 23 hour marathon of hiking.
