Milford Sound - Stunning!

March 28, 2010


Well the weather gods favoured us today – it was frosty and fair here, clear blue skies, puffy clouds rising up out of the mountain valleys and about 8 degrees (we were told to wear our beanies). This is the first day in a week that they have been able to fly into Milford Sound. The Fiordland area which is a coastal temperate rainforest gets rain over 200 days per year totalling over 10 meters of rainfall! It is one of the wettest areas in the world and the Tasman Sea that the fiords feed into ise considered the roughest in the world after Cape Horn with waves reaching 11 meters high. Fiordland National Park is the largest of New Zealand’s parks (about half the country seems to be parkland) and is a World Heritage Area. Well here is where language is going to fail me because there simply are not the words to describe the beauty and majesty of this area. If the number of pictures taken is any measure, Mary Rose snapped 147 today! We did a fly/cruise/fly expedition. You can drive, fly, walk or boat into Milford Sound however the drive is over 4 hours and not recommended for the faint of heart, boating is very rough around the coast so really the most efficient way to go is single engine aircraft (like our Cessna) or helicopter. We had a plane and pilot Blair for the day to ourselves.

The Flight into the sound (which is really a fiord as it is a drowned glacial valley NOT river valley) takes about 40 minutes and is both breathtaking and at times heart stopping. We quickly climbed to about 7000 feet which placed us above most peaks but still below the bigger ones and gave us an eagle eye view of the area. We flew northwest over four different ranges: The Remarkables (outside our campsite), the Richardson Mountains, the Humboldt Mountains and finally the Darran Mountains to reach the Tasman Sea. The mountains change from more gentle rounded schistose mountains, glacial worn with scree slopes inland to the jagged, rugged and higher granitic gneiss mountains of the coast. We saw braided rivers, spires, crags, cirques and glaciers and for those Tolkien fans with our hearts in our throats we flew over Isengard and through the pass where Gandalf makes his escape from the tower on the eagle’s back – WOW! We landed at the head of Milford Sound which involves coming out of the mountains over the sea, turning around, dropping several thousand feet into the fiord and landing on a short airstrip between steep mountains right at the base of Lady Evelyn falls – WOW!

Here while it was still cold the sun was out and we boarded our cruise ship the ‘Sinbad’ for a tour of the fiord. The ship was less than half full and the people really eager to see us as they hadn’t been able to tour for almost a week. The road into Milford Sound has been closed due to rock fall and the weather hasn’t allowed flights in. Our cruise lasted two hours and went up one side of the fiord and back along the other. Describing this trip could take pages but I’ll try to do it in a paragraph. The Sound which is a deep U shaped drowned glacial valley from about 14,000 years ago is filled with sea water but topped with a layer of tannin rich fresh water up to 10 meters deep. The walls of the gorge are covered with temperate rainforest – beeches, ferns, etc. which cling to slopes that are almost vertical. There is virtually no soil so the plants form a tangled root mat and less than 5% of the plants are anchored to the face so plant avalanches are common. If you can see the rock there was an avalanche in the recent past. The freshwater pours down the sides of the fiord from hanging valleys. As the glaciers retreated and melted, the rivers that once flowed on the top of the ice were left perched high up the valley wall and are now spectacular waterfalls hundreds of meters high. All the rain over the past week meant that every river was full to bursting and the fiord was showered with falling water, spray and rainbows. On several occasions our captain, who had a good sense of humour and later let the boys steer the ship hugged the cliff edge and gave all of us outside a good shower under the waterfalls. The sound is host to all sorts of life including black coral, crested penguins and marine mammals including seals which were basking on the rocks and nursing their young. When we reached the Tasman Sea the wind was furious (you could lean into it and it would support your body) but we were told this was a calm day- WOW! Two hours felt like minutes on this cruise and we were sorry to leave except we had the flight back to look forward to.

We flew back over a different route which was less rugged but equally beautiful. This took us over the Milford Track which is one of the most walked ‘tramps’ in New Zealand. In New Zealand they maintain huts along the major tramping routes and you can schedule your walk to take advantage of them. We have added this 4 day walk to our list of things we must do before we die. We flew back down over Lake Wakapitu (the largest lake in New Zealand by volume) and home. Today over Queenstown they were having a parasail festival to remember a famous jumper that died in the skies several years earlier. Every few minutes another parasail would descend to land in the school field just a block away from us. They launch themselves off mount Coronet in the Remarkables just behind our site. We took our Frisbee and Duncan’s boomerang and spent a bit of downtime throwing, watching and soaking up the sun. Supper was at Hell’s pizza where we had simply some of the best pizza I’ve ever had. We wandered the streets, toured the harbour and made our way home. Tomorrow we pull up stakes and head up the west coast to Westland/Tai Poutini National park to climb on the glaciers- WOW!