Hawea Flat - Feb 1st to 20th PART 1

The Routeburn Track was the last of our pre-planned activities and we were excited to find a spot to stay for a bit while we were in the Otago Region. (This is where you find the southern alps, glacier lakes and places like Wanaka and Queenstown). Through the website Help-X, we found a great place to stay just 10  mins out of Wanaka, in Hawea Flat. We stayed at John and Diana's place, in an awesome tiny house, and helped to build a swimming pond on their property.  This was actually fun work and pretty sweet to add masonry to the ol' NZ resume. Our tiny home had everything we could need, and was right close to stunning lakes and mountains! With a few weeks here, it gave us some time for more biking and hiking in the area but also a really amazing place to relax. Keegan started doing some online course-work and it was a nice place to get started on that too. We also decided that we wanted to get back to some trail running, and since John was both a local and an avid trail runner himself, he had some great suggestions to get us started. 

During our first week here, we got out for our first trail run up Rocky Mountain summit by Diamond lake. This was a perfect 7 km run with a great view of the near by mountain ranges and a lookout of lake Wanaka. We also were able to get away for an overnight hike into Mt. Aspiring National Park, where we headed up the Cascade Saddle Track for some great views of Mt. Aspiring itself, and the surrounding glaciers. After a day’s work we hiked into the park and camped just outside of Aspiring hut. This hut holds 40 people and was packed! We were happy to have the tent with us, although, we did dine that night with hundreds of sandflies! Cascade Saddle Track starts from the base of the hut and climbs quickly upward. Over 4km you gain about 1500M of elevation! This track actually has the highest fatality rate of any trail in NZ, but we felt pretty safe being summertime and the weather forecast showing good conditions. Because of time, we didn’t go all the way to the saddle but did manage to get to the Pylon, which is the high point of the track and had amazing views of the Dart Glacier in the distance. At the top we met some researchers and DOC members doing some Kea work. They were basically ‘fishing’ for Kea’s; tagging them and testing their blood for lead. High alpine fishing involved using what looked like a fishing rod with a loop on the end, attracting Kea’s with bird sounds over a bluetooth speaker and shinny pink ribbon, then snagging the bird when curiousity got the better of them. Since Kea’s like to eat just about anything, especially on the roof’s of huts in the area, we learned they end up taking in a lot of lead, and as consequence are declining in number. Keegan and I both loved the hike and would definitely recommended spending some time in Mt. Aspiring National Park! It is worth it.Les mer