Finished!

A few swing bridges more and we were back to the van :)

We did it! Amazing hike and well worth the (considerable) effort!

:-D

It's a walk in the park

Weather was a little cloudy but actually made the morning's hike much more refreshing - oh and the fact that finally it was all downhill helped a lot! The track descended through beech forests again with only a few drops of rain and nothing more.

Annoyingly we never used a single piece of waterproof clothing - just lugged them round for 3 days - pah! But the flip side of that has to be that we had 2 days of clear blue sky for the hike - so lucky :)

The third day

Up at 6:00 after a better night's sleep this time. Porridge and coffee for breakie and then off early for the "walk out" to try and beat the rain which was due.

Routeburn Falls Hut

Soon the trail started to descend past a fabulous waterfall to the hut where we were staying. The hut was perched at the bottom of the waterfall with a veranda all around with fantastic views of the valley where we were headed tomorrow.

Hut was a similar kind of set up to the previous one but a MUCH nicer version of it. As we were some of the first to arrive we got pick of the beds so we got bunks this time. Nice place to hang out on our last night.

Lake something

The trail continued on clinging to the near vertical rock face around a lake - woo!

"Brian, you are very small"

"That's because I'm a long way away!"

A photo of Bri atop Conical Hill - oh, and some mountains!

Harris Sadle

Eventually came out the the highest point of the trail at 1300m. From there we dropped our packs at the shelter and climbed even higher up Conical Hill - pretty hard even when we weren't laden down with stuff - the air was pretty thin and had to stop constantly to get our breath back. Views from the top all the way to the West coast - well worth the climb!