February | 2018 | Words and Light

Archive for February, 2018

Analog: Fiordland National Park, New Zealand

Posted in Analog, Personal, Photography, Travel, tagged fiordland, new zealand, where the stars are strange on February 19, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Of New Zealand’s 14 national parks, Fiordland National Park is the largest, arguably the most isolated and perhaps the least touched by humans.

It’s stunning.

A single, two-lane highway runs through the park, with only a few unpaved roads branching off. There are a couple established tracks for multi-day trampers, but otherwise, much of the park is inaccessible to visitors. Even before the development of the modern tourism industry, Fiordland has remained largely unmodified by humans because of the steep, glacier-carved terrain as well as moody weather (an annual average of 200 rainy days!) and the resulting thick vegetation.

We drove from Te Anau north to Milford Sound, where we had an afternoon cruise scheduled. On the way, we made a couple stops, including a brief detour down Hollyford Road to hike a bit on the Lake Marian track, from which several falls are visible.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get anywhere near Lake Marian itself — roundtrip, the entire track would have taken at least a few hours.

We did stop at “the Chasm” before arriving at Milford Sound. The Cleddau River’s thundering waters have, over time, carved out steep channels and falls in the rock that are visible from a couple foot bridges.

Next up: Milford Sound.

A selection of these photos can be purchased as prints at prints.christhedunn.com.

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Analog: Blue Pools, Lake Wanaka and Glenorchy-Queenstown Road, New Zealand

Posted in Analog, Personal, Photography, Travel, tagged new zealand, where the stars are strange on February 13, 2018| Leave a Comment »

There’s a lot of water in New Zealand, and it’s all beautiful.

Our next stop after Fox Glacier was Queenstown, so we took Highway 6 south. It’s a gorgeous route that follows the Haast River, first skirting around the edges of Mount Aspiring National Park and then delving through the park’s eastern sides. We stopped along the way to walk a quick track, cross a couple suspension bridges and see the Blue Pools:

Fun fact about this southwestern part of the South Island: If you stand still for longer than a moment, you will get swarmed by sandflies, which are gnat-sized flying insects that bite. The sandfly hordes were particularly bad when we were on the Blue Pools track, especially near the water, to the point that I worried I’d trapped a couple sandflies in my camera body after I changed lenses.

Onwards down Highway 6, there’s Lake Wanaka and its stunning views.

That’s an Instagram-famous tree, by the way.

We checked into our Queenstown hotel pretty late, so we explored the historic gold-mining town Arrowton and Queenstown the next morning. Queenstown was by far the single most touristy place we visited, as it’s basically a huge resort town with seasonal adventure activities like bungee-jumping, paragliding, kayaking, skiing, mountain biking and more. It was nice to walk around the shops, but it felt good to depart for a quick northbound detour to Glenorchy before going to Te Anau for the night.

The Glenorchy-Queenstown Road is more of a “journey, not the destination” experience, and we lucked out with some gorgeous weather on our scenic drive.

For the first half of this trip, I was obsessed with ferns. For the second half, I was obsessed with lupins.

Glenorchy is a super teeny town, and we fortunately found the one gas station before it closed at 5 p.m. After filling up our tank, we returned down the same road and then on to Te Anau, where we’d spend the next two nights.

A selection of these photos can be purchased as prints at prints.christhedunn.com.

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Analog: Fox Glacier (Te Moeka o Tuawe), New Zealand

Posted in Analog, Personal, Photography, Travel, tagged fox glacier, new zealand, where the stars are strange on February 2, 2018| 3 Comments »

The day after we relished golden sunshine and gallivanted on West Coast beaches, we were supposed to be ice-hiking on one of New Zealand’s two major temperate maritime glaciers.

But iffy weather made for less-than-ideal conditions for the helicopter flights necessary for taking us to and from Fox Glacier. Fortunately, we’d anticipated that weather could be an issue for the helicopters and so had already budgeted in an extra day in the area. So we spent the day hiking to see the glacier and then exploring the village.

The pedestrian track to view the glacier’s terminal face is initially pretty level, following a stream that flows from the glacier.

Then, the path becomes quite steep as it goes straight up the side of the valley, with no switchbacks. The worst part is, plenty of signage warns visitors to keep walking and not to stop, because the risk of rockfalls is so high. We arrived panting heavily at the path’s terminal, where we could finally get a good view of the glacier.

The next day, we returned to the Fox Glacier Guiding building and were delighted/relieved that the weather had cleared sufficiently for us to go on our ice hike. After getting a rundown on glacier and helicopter safety, we walked to the pad with the rest of our tour group: a couple with a young daughter, a brother and sister on holiday and three young women.

Once on the ice, we met our guide, strapped crampons to our boots and began our three-hour hike.

Our guide took us down the glacier from the helicopter landing area, where he knew there would be more interesting formations. He’d go on ahead of us, carve out steps in the ice if there was a slippery area and find features like crevices and ice caves that we could explore, once he’d inspected them for safety.

I’d heard that glaciers are constantly changing and moving, but there’s also the phrase “glacial pace,” so I asked him how dramatically the glacier changes. After a pause, he compared the glacier to a baby — day by day, it doesn’t seem to change much, but if you looked at it week by week or month by month, the differences are much more obvious.

The glacier hike was far and away the most expensive single experience we had in New Zealand, but we agreed it was absolutely worth it. Seeing the terminal face from the pedestrian track was awe-inspiring by itself, but it’s impossible to get a good sense of the glacier’s vastness until you’re flying over it or are exploring it on foot.

A selection of these photos can be purchased as prints at prints.christhedunn.com.

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Words and Light

An exploration of (photo)journalism

Archive for February, 2018

Analog: Fiordland National Park, New Zealand

Analog: Blue Pools, Lake Wanaka and Glenorchy-Queenstown Road, New Zealand

Analog: Fox Glacier (Te Moeka o Tuawe), New Zealand

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