2024 New Zealand: December 29th Glenorchy

 We woke up to wettish weather, but the forecast was actually just for occasional rain, and I was getting the idea that New Zealand weather forecasts tend to be more pessimistic than reality often is. Regardless, having come off a 4 day walk, and everyone not having recovered yet, I decided that this was a day to do more driving than hiking.

The drive from Queenstown to Glenorchy is famous for being pretty, and we had failed to find the Bob’s Cove trailhead 4 days ago, so I decided that this was worth doing. After breakfast, we got into the car and drove to up the road and visited Bob’s Cove trailhead. This was a beautiful shoreline and well worth the short walk, and on this day with overcast skies, we had surprisingly good sight distance even though all the nearby peaks were surrounded by clouds.

We stopped by one beach to practice skipping rocks on the water, but I slipped at one point and fell, which gave me some scabs to bring home from New Zealand. It hurt, but didn’t affect my hiking much.

When we got to the peak, the sun came out for a few moments, though the surrounding clouds did not all lift. We eschewed the Google Maps pointer to view a Lord of the Rings shooting location and walked back to the car. With that done, we kept driving towards Glenorchy. The road was amazing, with steep climbs followed by descents with grand views. There were only occasionally some stopping points, such as the Bennetts Bluff viewpoint, but by and large the road was too narrow to stop.

We drove past Glenorchy to the Lord of the Rings shooting location “Isengard Lookout”, but it was very disappointing. Fortunately, just a little bit further and we would be at one of the endpoints of the Routeburn track, so we drove there for a looksee. We arrived in the rain, but ate at the Routeburn Track shelter. After that we had time so we did a two hour walk on the Routeburn first to the Bridal Veil Falls (every national park must have one of those!), and then over to the first flats just before the Routeburn Flats hut. It drizzled a bit here and there but it was pretty enough to justify the walk.

We drove back to Queenstown to discover that it was rainy and when we tried to get reservations at the hotel they had no room indoors but could accommodate us outdoors in the a covered seating area, so we had an early dinner that was again quite delicious. I looked up the weather forecast and it had changed to the point where paying for the cable car to do the famous Ben Lomond hike wouldn’t be a total waste of money, so we made plans to do so.