NZ Day 10 - Milford Tramp

Day 2 of the tramp is where all the action (& awesome views) started. Despite the forecast of rain, the day dawned bright & clear. Looking behind the hut provided this tantalising glimpse of the mountains.

The walking was pretty easy, but it was a long day - 16.5km. But truly, when you're walking towards this, it gives you a pretty good incentive to keep going.

This is an old landslip area that we crossed - there were lots of scenes like this along the track. The whole area is constantly changing & we passed dozens of 'Danger - avalanche zone, do not stop' signs in our 4 days.

In the denser parts of the forest the moss soon takes over.

The water on the Milford track is some of the purest, cleanest & clearest in NZ. It was really nice to know we could fill our water bottles at pretty much any water source along the track.

A snow cave. There were signs warning us not to enter the caves, despite how good they looked inside. Apparently 1 cubic metre of snow weighs around 800kg & on a hot day like that one it wouldn't take much for it to collapse. We did see at least one tramper go inside & couldn't believe their stupidity.

B taking a well-earned rest on the riverbank.

Clinton Valley was just awesome to walk through - it's impossible to capture the scale of it with a small point & shoot camera like mine.

A dried up riverbed from one of the bridges. It doesn't take much rain for all these creeks & rivers to start flowing again. In parts of the track, the water levels can change up to 2m in an hour.

Long view of one of the bridges. We were really lucky to have the track in such good condition. There were a couple of older guys doing the tramp who had first done it about 30 years ago. Back then, there were hardly any bridges - crossing the river meant getting your feet wet.

Just a few waterfalls.

The river snaking through the valley.

Yet another waterfall.

After this, we started to get very tired & the weather also closed in so we basically legged it to the second hut - Mintaro - and made it just in time.