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Mt. Cook/Aoraki
Alex goes to Mt. Cook
May 30, 2007
Hey everybody! Today is Wednesday of the last week of classes before finals start. The pressure is building, and because the average final is worth 50 to 70 percent your grade, it’s likely that every student in Dunedin will be hunkered down in the library for the next few weeks. The finals a bit different from home here. I have finals on the 6th, 9th, 11th, and 19th of June. That’s quite a spread. Back at Willamette, finals are usually condensed into one week, but seeing as how much bigger the U of Otago is than my school back home (about 18,000 students bigger), the difference is understandable.
This last weekend Amanda and I decided it was time to get out of Dunedin for a while. We chose to go visit the tallest mountain in New Zealand, Mt. Cook, also known as Aoraki, and go on a couple of hikes. Mt. Cook is about 4-6 hours from Dunedin, depending on which route you take. Amanda and I packed up the car, gassed up and left town at about 2:15 in the afternoon. It was a beautiful sunny day, perfect for travel, and we hit the highway in a good mood. I was driving, and Amanda was in charge of the map to decide which route to take to Mt. Cook. About 15 minutes into the drive I hit a bump, and looked over at Amanda just in time to watch her hand hit the car door and the map flying out of her hands and out of the open window.
I couldn’t stop laughing.
After a few minutes of crying because I was laughing so hard I realized I was the one driving and should probably pay attention to the road.
The rest of the drive that day was smooth, and we stopped in Oamaru for groceries and a new map. We realized we weren’t going to make it to Mt. Cook before sundown, so we took our time after leaving Oamaru and stopped at an archeological Maori site with cliff paintings for a little while. The site was right next to the highway, and it was incredible to see these paintings that were hundreds of years old and still survived for us to see. Unfortunately, graffiti had become such a problem that a cage was put around the base of the cliff. It’s pretty sad to see a beautiful, ancient painting of a Maori god scratched out by “John Smith, 1914.”
That night Amanda and I camped at a picnic area in the back of Baby Blue. (Even though there were only two of us, the back of B.B. is still incredibly uncomfortable. You’d think I’d learn, huh? Amanda slept like a baby, of course.) We woke up the next morning and drove the rest of the way to Mt. Cook, stopping occasionally at a viewpoint or historical marker I made us look at.
We got to Mt. Cook national park around noon, and Mt. Cook was perfectly visible. It’s a beautiful snowy mountain, surrounded by several other mountains on each side. Amanda and I wanted to go on a hike with a viewpoint of Aoraki at the end, so we settled on the Sealy Point hike- a 3.5 hour hike with an incredible rise in elevation. The bottom of the hike is around 500 meters above sea level, and at the top it’s around 1250 meters. That’s nearly one kilometer gain after 1.5 hours of hiking.
The climb up was exhausting, but beautiful all the way up. We had to scramble up ridiculously steep stairs and even up rock falls in some parts, but we made it to the top just in time to see Mt. Cook disappear behind some clouds. We didn’t mind about that, as we had watched the mountain all the way up, but by then we were pretty tired and hungry and started on our way down.
About five minutes down from the top, Amanda was taking the lead and we were commenting on how nice the day was, when suddenly Amanda stepped down off a rock and tumbled sideways as a clearly audible “POP” came from her right ankle. I rushed down to see if she was okay, and watched as her ankle swelled up to twice its size. She had twisted it very badly.
We just sat there for a few minutes because she couldn’t move it without it taking her breath away. After I made sure her ankle wasn’t broken, I started worrying. How are we going to get down? We were 750 meters straight up from the parking lot, on a narrow path with steep steps and loose rocks. It was gong to take a while to get down.
Fortunately, help arrived in the form of four Norwegian students hiking down at the end of their day trip. One of them had aspirin, which Amanda gladly accepted, and they wouldn’t leave us until we got down to the bottom.
We all started slowly making our way down the mountain in three stages: I would carry Amanda down on my back, one of the Norwegians, Brit, did the same, and for the steep parts Amanda would scoot down on her butt. It took us over 2 hours to get back down, but we all made it safely and Amanda was a champ throughout the whole process.
When we got back to the car we decided to cut our trip short and head back to Dunedin. Besides Amanda’s injury, we realized we did have a lot of fun and had fulfilled our goal of leaving Dunedin for a while. We hopped in the car and put Mt. Cook behind us as we headed back towards our home.
At least I had a map to get us there.
