Photographs of my second Great Walk: Routeburn

Thankfully, I did not accidentally delete my pictures of my second Great Walk on the Routeburn Track. This walking track is also in Fiordland National Park, but it does not wind around Lake Te Anau like the Kepler Track did. The Routeburn track is through the moutains, but because it is not around the lake the views are very different. So, if any of you are considering hiking in Fiordland, expect that all three of the Great Walks there--Milford, Kepler, and Routeburn--look very different.

I am obsessed with all kinds of water: oceans, lakes, rivers, and waterfalls are always my favourite to photograph. The mountains and plants in New Zealand are amazing, so I have pictures of them too. But my heart is always with the water (I blame it on those 15 years of swimming back in my childhood). Since the Kepler Track wound around the lake, I mourned my lost photos and thought sourly, "The Routeburn track can never compare."

Luckily, I was wrong. The Routeburn track is very diverse. We walked through forests, crossed old and new bridges, crossed open streams, saw dozens of waterfalls, and had views of a lot of the other mountain tracks in Fiordland including the most challenging Rees-Dart Track, which is a range of gorgeous snow-capped mountains (and though I love photographing snow-capped mountains I will not be hiking this track because I do not hike through snow if I can help it!).

The beginning

 My beloved water. All of the rivers I've seen on the South Island look like this. What have we done to our rivers in the U.S. to make them look so unlike this gorgeous sea green color? 

The beech forest, draped in a neon green lichen called old man's beard

The Routeburn Track takes hikers through a bunch of different valleys and breaks in the forest line or "bush line" as the Kiwis say. It's nice because you get to see the mountain lakes and rivers up close, as opposed to the Kepler Track, where you were always looking down on the water from great heights.

Night one: in my mummy sleeping bag on my bunk

Day two: the day of waterfalls!

There were a few lakes like this up high in the mountains. It is so cool to see these; I fell in love with them. The hut we slept in on night two was right next to a lake like this called Lake Makenzie. Sadly, it was much too cold to swim.

Day three!

On the Kepler Track, Abe and I were too exhausted to do any of the side trips except one waterfall walk. But on Routeburn, we decided to climb Conical Hill summit. It was extremely icy, and we had to get down on our hands and knees to climb some of it, but we made it!

At a couple points on the track, we were so high up that we could see the Tasman Sea!

This is the "orchard." It is just a huge clearing with trees that look like fruit trees, but sadly, they aren't. I was amazed by how many different kind of shrubs and ferns could be in one valley!

We saw many waterfalls that day, but the largest and most spectacular waterfall was Earland Falls.