According to legend Aorkai and his brothers were sons of The Sky Father, who married Earth Mother.  While touring their Earth Mother in an effort to get to know her better, their canoe struck a reef.  The brothers climbed to the high side of the boat and were frozen by the southern wind.  Eventually they turned into stone.  The petrified canoe became New Zealand’s south island, while the brothers and crew became the Southern Alps.  Aorkai, the tallest brother, was named after the tallest peak, which Europeans called Mt. Cook.  In the 1950s New Zealand decided to make the area a national park.      

Today we hiked in the Hooker Valley, along the Hooker River, to Hooker Lake, and saw the terminal edge of Hooker Glacier.  Glaciers carved the valley, giving it a characteristic U-shape.  The water system is fed by melt water and flows into Lake Pukaki.  (I took a photo of it yesterday but misspelled the name in my email.)  It rained for most of our hike, so we never saw Mt. Cook’s peak.  We were well prepared for rain, and the scenery was still breathtaking.  Enormous hanging glaciers hugged mountain sides, beneath them melt water causing falls thousands of feet long, which all collected into the Hooker River, a raging waterway you wouldn’t dare fall into.    

Some call Mt. Cook a “shy mountain.”  In the photos you can see the clouds which commonly obscure the peak.  Warm, moist air from the Tasman Sea runs smack into the refrigerated air of the region.  The moisture gets squeezed right out and falls down as snow or rain.  Despite the voluminous annual rainfall, the area is still very dry.  That’s because there’s actually very little top soil to absorb the moisture.  The ground, instead, is composed of moraine, which is a mass of rocks and sediment carried down and deposited by glacial activity.  Water trickles down through the cracks into the moraine, which goes over 600 feet down in this area, quickly draining from the surface.  Plant life has adapted beautifully to this environment, sometimes creating its own soil to grow in from its older, dead leaves.  

Geologically Mt. Cook’s height is due to plate tectonics.  The top third of the mountain is being pushed up along the Main Divide Fault.  It’s actually a mountain on top of another mountain.  The peak is roughly 12,000’ tall.  It recently lost some height because in 2011 a huge chunk of its peak came down.  We heard an avalanche during our hike, a foreboding sound which resembled thunder but lasted longer.  Distances are so vast, however, that by the time you hear it the actual avalanche is long over.         

Our guide’s name was Ai, a Japanese national here on a seasonal work visa.  She walks the trail six days a week for tourists, who are mostly Asian.  She said 95% of the guests here at The Hermitage are either from Japan, China, or South Korea.  She struck me as a young soul, wandering the Earth to find her place in it.  She also struck me as a good deal for whatever company she worked for … they make bank from tourists and she gets the “privilege” of working in New Zealand, while living with 8 other people, without a car, in an isolated village with fewer people than two fully packed subway trains.  I suspect much of the hotel staff are entirely deportable after the summer season.  The village shrinks to 300 people in winter. 

A lot of invasive species live here, brought by Europeans who didn’t know any better.  Unfortunately due to New Zealand’s isolation, many native plants and animals never evolved protection against what humans have introduced.  Migrating birds lost their ability to fly, since they never needed to leave the ground, making them easy prey for animals back home we hardly care about.  Without predators the foreign plants and animals grow without limit.  The Dept. of Conservation is tasked with this Sisyphean effort of killing invasive plants and animals.  New Zealand, for all its ruggedness, strikes me as a very fragile.  While no continent has been spared the spread of humans (along with the stuff they brought along), New Zealand seems particular ill-suited to cope with its new found popularity.

Tomorrow we head to Christchurch in the morning.