What a great surprise! Arriving as we did in the night we had no idea there was a lake so nearby. Here's a photo of Howden Hut taken from the same spot as the two preceding photos.
We headed out the same way we came in. About thirty minutes back towards the road we found a path leading up a summit the lady at the DOC office suggested was "the best bang for your buck few minutes of hiking in the area". Though the weather was quickly clouding over we decided to go up and have a look.
Dale and I stumbled upon these tracks on the short walk up on fresh snow (about an inch had fallen freshly the night before). Possum?
Here we are on top (except for Dale who is taking the photo). As you can tell, there wasn't much to see at that point. Oh yeah, we left our packs on a rock on the Routeburn so that we could quickly get up and down this path.
Dale took this one of me just before we got back to the parking lot.
We then decided to head up towards Wanaka to see if we could do any tramping in Mt. Aspiring National Park. We figured that we would find something to do there and if not we could just get a hostel. We were going to go up over "Crown Range Rd." but a sign stated that we would be fined if we drove it in this season without chains on board so we forged a different path. Matt quoted Lord of the Rings and we had a good laugh, "The Pass is closed.. Then we will go through the Mines!"
When we got to Wanaka we went straight to the DOC office to ask about tramps in the area. It turned out that there were basically river crossings over the road out to any of the tramps we were looking at that our van would likely not be able to ford. We headed over to a hostel when I had the idea that we could just go on to the next town and find a hut to stay at there. Dale studied his map and found what appeared to be a hut just on the side of the road in the Mt. Cook area. We decided we would drive down there to stay and would do some day hikes in the Mt. Cook area the next day. Before heading down though, we stopped at the "Wanaka Breworks" we found in Dale's guide. All three of their beers were fantastic. Dale suggested that their Lager was the best Lager he had ever had.
Oh yeah that was day 3 of 4 on that thermal. It was getting pretty dank.
We called up Mt. Cook on our way North to make sure that some of the day hikes were doable and found that they were. Everything looked like we were set to drive into Mt. Cook and have an easy night.. tramp about ten feet to a hut and crash. When we got to the hut however, we found out that it was a private hut owned by The Canterbury Mountaineering Club. This left us basically in a predicament as none of the other Mt. Cook huts were reachable due to avalanche danger. We saw a shelter that appeared to be either for emergency use or for backpackers to prepare for tramps in that was right next to a DOC campsite. We decided we might have to pay for a hostel and drove into Mt. Cook town to check if there was space at the YHA. We found that there was space but it would cost almost $30/person to stay there.
At this point I made the suggestion that we could crash in the emergency shelter thing on the picnic tables despite the lack of sleeping pads and matresses. It seemed like almost nobody was into it but somehow eventually everyone warmed up to the idea. I didn't realise that most of a sleeping pad's function is to insulate the sleeping bag from the ground, not simply make the ground more cushy.
We crashed in this sad excuse for a hut. My favorite part of this shelter is that it has about a foot of space where the roof meets the walls that was just a wire grate so that snow and wind blew through. Snow fell on us throughout the night and the wind blew hard. Matt and Rachel shared a sleeping bag to stay warm and PT and Nora tried to wrangle a similar thing though they failed. Dale and I ate some metaphorical man-up pills and went to sleep.
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