A glacier (I forget which one) was easily visible above where we stopped.
We decided to pop in to the Edmund Hillary Centre, dedicated to the legendary Sir Edmund, a local Kiwi hero who led the first expedition to conquer Everest.
Interesting though the Everest stuff was, I was intrigued to learn that Hillary had also been a legendary explorer of the Antarctic. In 1958 he led the first team to reach the South Pole since Scott in 1912. It was on the snowfields around Mount Cook that the team did much of the training for their expedition.
The centre had some tractors that saw use in the Antarctic.
Upon seeing them, I remembered my dad's Antarctic stories and wondered what would happen if one of them fell down a crevasse...
As evening was drawing in, we made camp in the nearby DOC campsite, resolving to make the walk up the Hooker Valley to the end of the Hooker Glacier the next morning. The sunset was beautiful and that ought to have been an omen of good weather to come in the morning.
Of course not. During the night, the heavens opened; it turned out that this was the end of a long drought and that the rains were welcomed by the area's farmers. It was still raining heavily in the morning, cussing our plans of making the walk up the Hooker Valley. We made plans instead to head straight to the Fox Glacier, which also originates from Mount Cook and heads west, down the other side of the mountains from where we were. Despite its proximity, we had a day's drive ahead of us to get there since there was no direct route across the enormous mountains of the Southern Alps. Our route therefore took us, back to Wanaka and across the Haast Pass. This we did in a hurry as the rain beat down.
We camped at a campsite near Haast that evening, hoping that the weather would clear up by morning.
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