Mt Cook National Park

A major tourist draw (and worldwide mountaineering destination), Mt Cook park is the heart of the Southern alps.  With numerous peaks rising over 2,000 meters from base to summit, and Mt Cook itself exceeding 3,000 meters, the reasons are obvious.

Even from 45km away, Mt Cook dominates the skyline.  Its flanks shaped by relentless glacial advance and retreat, the sides are steep and unforgiving.


The majority of tourists see this view from the valley floor.  A few brave souls will climb to Mueller’s hut, climbing up over 800 meters of steps, for 1,100 meters of elevation gain.  An adventurous few with unyielding fortitude (and thigh muscles) will climb one of the surrounding mountains, with hundreds of mapped routes.  Some will even brave Mt Cook itself.  Every year a tragic few are lost to the slopes.  Ice falls, fatigue, injury, exposure, landslides, and sheer stupidity all take their share.


Our first stop was the Tasman Glacier.  Flowing alongside the eastern side of Mt Cook, it is a massive thing.   The lake in this photo was a few hundred meters of ice in the early 1900s.  The ridge we were standing on is the terminal moraine, endless tons of rock gouged out by the glacial engine, and dumped at what was once its terminal face.  Now only 24km long, it once extended to the where we stood.
 

Even this late in the season, a few icebergs floated in the milky water. This one is about the size of the van above water, and 10 times its size below.


With a bit of daylight left, we walked down the Hooker Valley to see the other large glacier in the park.  Note the smaller glaciers clinging to the upper slopes.  These chunks of ice are at a minimum 100ft (30 meters) thick.




There were numerous bridges on the walk.

Crossing this one, a falcon flew a few meters in front of us, and landed on one of the bridge cables.



Where it promptly hopped onto a rock to get a drink of water.  Diving at over 100mph, they catch their prey in mid air, knocking them unconscious.  Like all falcons, they have a special tooth on their beak, which they use to dislocated their preys necks.




Here is Mueller Lake.  Stained an opaque gray by “rock flour” ground up by the glacier, it will eventually turn a milky blue farther downstream.






Check out that snow on Mount Cook (below)!  In the 1990s, about 15 meters of Mt Cook’s top fell straight off!  On the right side of this photo, thousands of cubic meters of rock broke free, falling over 2,000 meters to the glacier below.  It blasted across the kilometer wide glacier to the other valley wall traveling hundreds of meters up the other side before finally coming to rest.  This slide registered as a 4.3 magnitude earthquake in a town 45km away!  So Mt Cook is just a little bit shorter for this millennium's climbers.   Give it a few hundred thousand years and it will gain the height back though!




Check out the 30m tall ice towers on the upper glaciers!


The scree fields coming down the naked mountainsides were intense.




We hoped to do the climb to Mueller Hut, high on a ridge above the valley the next day.  However the wind changed directions, and the entire valley was filled with rain from the early morning.  As is typical of NZ mountain weather, it was partly cloudy and dry 45km to the east!