West Coast Wilderness Weekend

In two and a half days I experienced lakes, glaciers, waterfalls, rainforests, rivers, fern forests, swamps and beaches. Only in New Zealand.

I started this adventure with four travelling companions.

---Dushan: Dushan just finished his thesis for grad school on the ophilite belt terrane of New Zealand. He is our 252 lab teacher. Dushan is an interesting dude. He is quiet and sarcastic. You never really know what the heck he is thinking or if he is being serious or not. He doesn’t like Americans. It was really interesting that he took us on this trip. Favorite Quote: “Drew! You are the only person in the car that I don’t know everything about.” Dushan getting Drew to talk and the backseat of girls to shut-up :) “Nobody is starting that song until I come back.” About the song Fast Car by Tracy Chapman ... Whitney and I lost it for about 5 minutes after this one. Who knew Dushan liked Tracy Chapman? Lol! :)

---Drew: Drew is from Denver, but he goes to school in up-state NY. He is really funny and has a knack for puns. He enjoys the history of geology and paleontology and he likes hydrology. He kinda freaks out for fossils. :) He and I are lab partners in the Basins class and he is in the Butler program. Favorite Quote: “It’s not like America, New Zealand is SO much better.” Dripping with sarcasm because Dushan said that we always said something in America was like what we were seeing. “Well, 10 generations ago...” ...this is how Drew started when Dushan said he knew nothing about him.

---Whitney: Whitney is from LA. I didn’t know Whitney before this trip and I’m really glad she came and I got to know her. Whitney is not afraid to say anything. She has a really fun, bubbly personality. She is a junior, but she just recently switched to a geology major. I’m excited to hang out with her after in Favorite Quote: “These clouds are like decoration for the sky.”

---Jennifer: Jennifer is from Topeka Kansas and she goes to K-State in Manhattan. That is where my parents (and a bunch of aunts and uncles) went and it’s where my grandparents live. We bonded over Kansas chert and limestone. Next time I’m in Manhattan I’m going to call her up so mom and I can go through the geology building :) Anyway, Jennifer is really nice. I think this is her first time out of Kansas and the surrounding states. I had met her before this trip because she came with Butler as well. She is very excitable and it was contagious. Favorite Quote: “I love New Zealand!” ...after going through a big puddle 4-wheel driving and just about everything else. :)

They were the integral parts in an awesome group and a fantastic trip. I’m so glad these were the people who came on this trip. There are so many more favorite quotes, but either they wouldn’t make any sense or I can’t remember them. :)

Friday at 5pm was our departure time from the north side of the geology building. We travelled in Dushan’s 4-wheel drive which has 5 seats...it ended up being boys in the front and the three girls in the back. It worked out perfectly. On the back of the car there was a sticker that said “ I <3 Olivine”. Needless to say I was a big fan of that sticker. Olivine is my favorite mineral, Dushan’s favorite mineral and Jenn’s favorite mineral. All Dushan had to say about this was something to the effect of “it kind of ruins it when someone else has the same favorite mineral as you”. Lol sorry Dushan. As we were packing up Dushan mentioned that he had went through and made sure the four of our Maerewhenua projects were marked (graded) so that he wouldn’t be tempted to change our grades after he realized we had no idea what we were talking about after spending a weekend with us. He did mention that we all passed though.

We were off! Dushan as stony faced as ever and four visibly excited Americans. I just knew this was going to be a weekend to remember. There are few roads on the South Island for the amount of land there is, so we went south to Balclutha then headed west. We passed from Gore to Clinton on the Presidential Highway while a few snide Bush jokes were passed along in the front seat. None of that was appreciated by yours truly. We continued on to Riverdale were Dushan’s Ophilites were. Ophilites are cross-sections of oceanic crust that were accreted onto a continent at a subduction zone. So in this area you can follow the formation from oceanic basalt, down to more mafic rock all the way to peridotite from the mantle (which is mostly olivine). We followed a fault up a valley to a glacial lake where there was camping sites. We continued on past that lake to the next one, well past when the road became more of a trail. It turned into a 4x4 track, Dushan put it in 4-lo and we had a great ride!! We ended up at a DOC (Department of Conservation) hut out in the bush. The stars were magnificent and we jacked the mattresses from the hut and set up our sleeping bags outside. It was a chilly/windy night but I can’t think of anything as refreshing as sleeping under the stars in the middle of nowhere.


In the morning, and I use that term loosely because the beautiful stars were still out when Dushan woke us up, we woke up, ate, packed up and loaded up. A mouse had found my food that night, but that’s ok...they don’t eat much. Next we 4-wheeled out of the valley back down to the lakes. At about this point I asked if I could take a picture with Whitney’s camera because I didn’t have one. She agreed and I proceeded to be a shutter bug and take a bunch. Then she just said I could have her camera for the rest of the trip and take pictures. It was perfect, it made us both really happy because I love taking pictures and she loves to have them but she never takes enough. I was ecstatic!
Dushan told us that one of the places we stopped was where the ending scene of the Fellowship of the Ring movie was filmed. I was at the river where Sam almost drowns when Frodo tries to leave the Fellowship alone, right after they are at Lothlorien. It was gorgeous. We also stopped at a few crazy bridges. They had signs that said the amount of people who where allowed on the bridge at one time. One of them was only one...Whitney and I went together. We like living on the edge! The bridges are hard to explain so I’ll just put in a picture.



Next we headed back toward Riverdale (not Rivendell sadly) to continue west toward Fiordland. First we came to Lake Te Anau and the town Te Anau. It was beautiful, the lake is such a bright blue from the glacier and snow melt.
[[[I will keep telling you how beautiful everything is, but keep in mind that everyway you look and turn something takes your breath away and you feel the need to take a picture and stare. I will run out of adequate adjectives if I haven’t already.]]]
In Te Anau we stopped at a bakery and I got the most delicious chocolate croissant I have tasted since Starbucks in Shanghai with Grandmother! We filled up on petrol (gas) and stopped by the DOC office to take a look at some maps and look around. Dushan showed us where we were going and explained some of the larger scale geology of NZ that we didn’t know so well. It’s fascinating! There is almost every type of geologic phenomena represented in New Zealand’s geologic history.


So into the glacier carven schists of Fiordland we wandered. Out of the rain and the clouds rose the sharp peaks. As we entered Fiordland National Park we broke out off the trees to see only clouds...but as they rose and as we looked we could see the extremely steep, high walls of the U-shaped valley. Everywhere you look there was a breathtaking waterfall. We continued northwest and deeper into the sharp cliffs of Fiordland. At one point we stopped off the road a ways to get out and enjoy the view and the fine mist that was coming down. We could spot hanging valleys and landslides as our eyes took in the view. Right when we were getting back into the car we saw a huge rainbow inside the valley! It was beautiful and it reminded me of God’s promises... for some reason :) We gaped for a short amount of time and then were off again. We drove through Fiordland stopping at various short walks and rock outcrops. One of the stops was right before the tunnel that goes under a huge mountain. Before and after going through the tunnel I could look up and see waterfalls like veins over the stark, dead rock cliffs. Water is the life blood of Fiordland, the reason ferns hang to the rock faces and moss hangs from the trees. Water is plentiful, life abounds.

Our final destination in Fiordland was Milford Sound. We got to the dock area where people usually get on a boat and go into the sound...which is actually more accurately called a fiord. We went around the back and jumped an eight foot tall DOC fence blocking a dangerous path that had a sign that read...
Passed this fence was a slightly sketchy wooden boardwalk, at the end you could look right to see a huge waterfall or look left out into the Milford Sound. Oh and it was raining the whole time :) On the way back we stopped at a few more locations to hope out in the rain, see something incredible and hop back in. One such place was called The Chasm. We hiked up to a bridge that over looked an insanely eroded river valley. There were holes and arches eroded by the constant power of water into the solid shist.



Dushan decided to take us up north to Haast pass (one of the few ways to get to the west coast) for the night. So we drove and drove and drove. One major good thing about this trip was that we had an iPod tape adapter. We listened to so many different kinds of music. We took turns with our iPods, sometimes we would all be jamming to a song and other times it was just what the DJ at the moment felt like hearing. After awhile Dushan popped in a cassette of some NZ classic best hits of all time. I really enjoyed most of the NZ music and it was a good change, I had exhausted my iPods selection. At about 10pm ish we arrived at the beach. We camped in a pavillion right past a sign that read “NO CAMPING”. I fell asleep to the sound of crashing waves.


In the morning we were greeted by a slight damp, ocean/salt-spray feeling and again the sound of waves. This would have been a perfect morning, except the dreaded sand flies. This was my first experience with them and I wish it could be my last. Sand flies are little tiny flies that look like fruit flies (maybe a little bit bigger) but they BITE! They swarm around your face, hands, ears...anything not covered and bite. The bites don’t hurt at first, it’s just really annoying to have them flying into your food/nose/eyes/ears. The extra kicker is that the bites start to hurt a day after you are bit and they continue to itch for about a week. Nasty little buggers. Anyhow, this morning we walked on the beach (Kansas (Jen) and Denver (Drew) are always quite excited to be by an ocean) then we walked inland about 2 min past our campsite to an estuary/tidal zone/swamp. We walked through the swamp on a boardwalk and looked at the tea colored water, dinosaur trees and listened to the birds.
Back in the car. Off to find jade.
We drove the west coast and went to a bunch of rivers looking for jade. Actually, you need tempered steal to know that what you have found is jade, so we were actually looking for jade-like green rocks that could have been anywhere in the range of re-metamorphosed weathered mantle rock. I won’t go into the geodetails here because I don’t remember them. :) I did find some pretty sweet green jade-looking rocks. The misty west coast was a lot like the northwest coast. Along the coast we stopped and tramped through a yellow eyed penguin nesting area to the beach (we didn’t see any penguins). This beach had huge basalt boulders...we wondered what basalt was doing (that is kinda curious if you know the geology of the area). It turns out that this is the first basalt that formed the ocean floor right when the rocks we now call NZ were separating from Gondwanaland and the Tasman sea was opening up. Not a big deal!! That’s awesome!

About this time I figured out that Jennifer and I both have done ballet for a large portion of our lives and we love to choreograph stuff in our heads. Super random and awesome. :) We did a short plie barre combination on a pier over the Tasman sea.

Next we headed back up to Haast Pass to go inland to head home. Two times during our drive we turned around to go back and photograph cute and/or weird look bovine. At one point Dushan just pulled over on the side of the road and said “everyone out”. We got out and wondered what the heck this was about. He then pointed to an area that was covered in grass but you could see about a meter of steep elevation change. That is the last movement of the Alpine Fault. THE Alpine Fault that runs the length of NZ and has shifted and squished up the rocks of NZ. WOAH. I got a picture where 2 people were on the Australian Plate and two people were on the Pacific Plate. IN-FREAKIN-CREDIBLE! :D


Then we went to Dushan’s 3rd favorite waterfall in NZ. It didn’t have a huge drop but it was an incredible amount of water going at an incredible speed. It was beautiful. We climbed down some boulders to get a better look...then I might have climbed out on a boulder over the water that could possibly have been dangerous. ;) It was an interesting thought knowing that if I fell in I would die. No other option.

On our way back through Te Anau we stopped for petrol and Dushan bought us all ice cream, this was possibly the only nice thing he had done other than take us on this trip. :) It was delicious after my same dull food the entire weekend. He the said “Shania Twain lives over there.” Nonchalant. We responded with a “What?!” Then a lot of laughing. How random. Next thing we know Dushan decides to go see her house.....and the slot canyon right by her house. We listened to Shania Twain music the whole way there. I only had four songs, so we had to listen to “Man, I Feel Like a Woman” twice. Bummer :) Once we arrive to as close as we could drive we got out...Dushan got out and he had a black ski mask over his face. LOL if you know Dushan at all this is the most hilarious thing ever. Then we looked at the awesome slot canyon! It was really deep. The only thing I wanted to do was repel down, creek walk and climb back up. Next time I see Shania Twain, I’ll just ask if that’s ok.

On the way back we stopped by a few dams. They were kinda cool. On the way back to Dunedin we talked a lot. The girls in the back seat have talked the whole time ...and by this time we knew a lot about each other. And as a result of the close quarters, so did Drew and Dushan. Dushan said out of the blue, “Drew! You are the only person in the car that I don’t know everything about.” Hahahaha. Then Drew said “Well, 10 generations ago...” It was the best beginning to a story ever. It was really interesting to hear about Drew’s life and family and neighbors :) Right when he was done I told Dushan it was his turn. He said he couldn’t because he still had to have some dignity and be the teacher on Thursday. Then there was an awkward 30 seconds where no one talked. Then he started telling us about his grandparents, parents, sister, working at a florist and living in Auckland. Now we were all caught up on each others lives, we had a great weekend, it was incredible geology and we were back in Dunners.

Wearing my backpack and carrying the rest of my crap with my boots hanging off the back while I was walking back to my flat... I just started grinning. How blessed am I to be living this life? Seeing these sights? Meeting people who each have a story of their own? Just being me, living life to the fullest.