Mt. Cook

We arrived 20km outside of Mt. Cook in the evening.  Colin took this amazing picture right before we got there.  The cloud was in just the right place to block some of the sunlight.

That night the sky was clear with stars clearly in sight.  We thought we’d get lucky with the weather.  The next morning we had planned on doing a hike up the Hooker Valley.  When we went to Mt. Cook with the Active group – this was the second hike option.  We’d heard it had some beautiful views.  Unfortunately, when we woke up, it was snowing.  We couldn’t see any of the mountains because of the clouds and talked to people who said it was even worse in Mt. Cook.  Even as we were gathering all this information and deciding what to do, the snow started falling harder.  I can’t remember the  last time i’ve seen it snow that hard.

It continued to snow for the next 30min of driving.  Right outside of Lake Tekapo we saw some vehicles that had slid off the road.  It reminded us of the dangerous side of snow.

Oh well, it was beautiful while it lasted.  We stopped in Lake Tekapo to see how the weather was towards Christchurch.  We found out that it was raining right up the street a bit, so we decided to keep going since we’d seen the worst of it.  We arrived in Christchurch and stayed with a guy we met in Okarito named Paul.  He is a pastor at a baptist church in Christchurch and we pulled in on Saturday night.  So we went to his church, Opawa Baptist Church, on sunday morning.  Then stayed with him one more night and left Monday afternoon for Kaikoura.
By Colin and Andre’a Feldhaus