Skiing in July!

This weekend Graham and I went on a little adventure to Wanaka, a small ski town three and a half hours northwest of Dunedin. We left early Friday morning and arrived just in time to get an afternoon pass at Treble Cone and do some skiing! The ride there was very interesting. The road takes you right through Central Otago, the region in NZ where most of the Lord of the Rings was filmed. I've never seen those movies, but the landscape here seems just perfect for their filming. There are a lot of rolling hills with hardly any trees, mostly just knee or waste-high bushes, followed by what looks like a waste land of dirt. Some of the mountains look like giant piles of sand held together by small clumps of grass that is hardly visible from the road. Here is a picture of the Clutha River (2nd largest river in NZ I believe) and some sand-like mountains:

The contrast in color is really quite beautiful, but without the river, it looks very much like a wasteland full of large/high mountains. 

When we finally arrived in Wanaka, we headed straight to the ski mountain. After the 4.4 km drive up the access road (so sketchy...no guard rails and muddy switch backs the whole way), we got on our skis and hit the slopes. The day was absolutely beautiful and the views from the ski area were of other mountains in the Southern Alps, and then centralized on Lake Wanaka, basically at the base of the mountain. 

Saturday the mountains were in the clouds, so we decided to do some day hikes instead of skiing in the rain. We first hiked Rocky Mountain, a mountain between the ski area and Lake Wanaka. It was a 7 km loop including Diamond Lake, a view point to Lake Wanaka, and finally the summit. It luckily didn't rain on us too much, and it was sunny enough to see about half of the beautiful views the summit has to offer. 

Diamond Lake

Graham at the summit of Rocky Mtn.

Since the weather wasn't the best, we spent the afternoon at an Illusion museum. It was really neat and had tons of cool illusions like where the water comes from in this floating faucet:

Or these:   Teach/Learn, hate/love, and a neat room that was totally tilted!       

 

On our way back from the museum, we passed by another mountain, Mt. Iron which looked nice, so we decided to hike up that one too! I'm so glad we did, the views were great! The town of Wanaka, Lake Wanaka, and the beautiful Southern Alps. It was a nice end to a great day of fun activities!

Panoramic at the summit!

Lake Wanaka and the Southern Alps

Sunday we spent the day on the slopes again. We had an absolutely beautiful morning with hardly a cloud in the sky! We had such a great weekend in Wanaka! Can't wait to go back to do more hiking and skiing! 

Sunrise on the way to the mountain

And a pit stop at a beach on Lake Wanaka on our way home!