Mt. Cook/Aoraki/White Horse Hill
I can hear the wind before I feel it shaking my tent, howling through the tall stand of trees on the far side of my tent. I brace for impact just before the wind squishes the side of my tent up against my sleeping bag. This gust is particularly vicious, ripping my tent’s rain cover away from the stake loosely securing it to the lee side of the tent, then pulling it back against the more securely fastened clips on the other side. They hold, but my tent is now uncovered, thank goodness it isn’t raining. Frankly I had been waiting all night for that to happen, growing a bit more fearful each time I was woken by the slapping of my poorly installed rain cover in seemingly ever increasingly more powerful bursts of wind.
There was no wind when I arrived yesterday. It was 29C and I was worried about getting too hot to sleep comfortably. Ha! The mercury has dropped to nearly 10C, plummiting as the winds rose, gathering force as they rolled down Lake Pukaki, sweeping several more miles down the valley before crashing into the White Horse Hill campsite. Needless to say, overheating wasn’t a problem.
I wish the wind hadn’t woken me repeatedly through the night, but I’m glad it has now. Staring up theough the now-uncovered ceiling vents of my tent, I can see the peak of Mt. Sefton—Cook’s less famous (though still tall at 3159m) neighbor—bathed in the fresh orange post-dawn sunlight. It’s incredibly beautiful. Most of the mountain remains in the shadow of its neighbors, but the peak looks as if it’s on fire or bathed in a coat of lava. This is a sight I could never see anywhere else; the 25 hours of mostly-sleepless travel it took to get here were completely worth it.
Now I’ll break down my campsite, taking extra care to leave no trace in a beautiful place like this, and then I’m Oscar Mike, heading further south for Queenstown, the so-called adrenaline capital of the world. We’ll see if I cam fit a 134m bungy jump off the Nevis Highwire into my budget…
