(written on February 11th from notes taken previously).
Got away from my sleeping spot pretty late this morning (was almost 9:45 🙃) and headed to Hanmer Springs, which I didn’t realize, was another tourist town.
😶
Really?!?! So far into the hills and seemingly away from everything?!?!
[sigh]
Oh well.
My destination wasn’t Hanmer Springs, so I just blew on through and headed up a really bad road, the worst I’d been on to date (at least with respect to the tires, as there were many long stretches of unavoidable, sharp-looking rocks. 😬
Gratefully, I made it through the worst of them unscathed.
I had thought I was going to hike to Dog Stream Falls, but I didn’t realize it was a super long hike (2-3 hours), and I wasn’t really feeling it, so I nixed that stop.
I headed up, up, up–all the way to Jack’s Pass, and then I paused at Rainbow Junction, as I wasn’t sure the way I wanted to go.
I could go east which would give me two options. I would run into a junction that would allow me to loop around almost all the way back to Hanmer Springs, but on a different road, or I could follow the road a massively long way, through the beautiful mountains, all the way back to the town of Seddon, just a tad southeast of Blenheim.
Though I’m sure it would have been beautiful, I wasn’t really feeling a sort of backtrack.
Thinking about it now, it might be a road I would want to take in the future, as I’m sure it’s gorgeous, but I decided to head west, as I was thinking I’d head over to Cow Stream Natural Hot Springs, and the north through the mountains and eventually over to highway 63.
The hot springs idea boiled off quickly, as it looks like I would need either a mountain bike or four-wheel drive to get there, and from what I’m reading, it’s a sandfly Mecca–way too far to be worth it.
😅
So… no thx. 🙃
The drive was beautiful, though. There was one place along the dirt road that had large clusters of one particular variety of wild flowers.
The biggest concentration of them seemed to be along a creek on the top of what I’m guessing were gravel banks created by avalanches? (there were rocky/gravelly mounds on both sides of the creek, all the way down, as if someone had plowed a groove into the ground, and the contents of the groove had spilled out into mounds onto both sides of the stream).
Apparently, this particular type of wildflower absolutely loved that setup, as the flowers were together in large, relatively densely packed, clusters, almost as if someone had come along and scattered a whole bag of seeds.
Beautiful. ☺️
I continued on, chatting a little bit with my sister, expecting to lose reception at any time, only to run into a cell phone tower near Lake Tennyson–smack dab in the middle of exactly nowhere. 😆
I wasn’t complaining, though.
I hung out at Lake Tennyson for a good long time as the clouds and rain rolled in. Views were minimal because of the weather and low clouds (being in a high alpine valley).
I did get a little annoyed at a couple of groups of people who, with the grass already soggy and muddy and a bit torn up from others driving on it, decided to drive their large trucks through the soggy grass, furthering the damage by adding to the deep muddy ruts.
They had no need to go where they did. It saved them maybe 15 meters of walking from their vehicle to the shelter of the pavilion that was there.
I don’t like it at all when people are thoughtless… selfish like that.
One of them was a group of maybe 20 somethings who downed some alcoholic drinks, leaving some of their garbage behind before taking off–garbage I then collected. 😒
Then there were a couple of trucks that instead of doing a 3-point turn to go back on the hard packed gravel, just did a loop right through the soggy, muddy grass to get back to the road.
😒
Erg. C’mon, people. Be respectful, eh?
Oh well. I’m sure I’ve been on the other end of it multiple times.
I veged out for a good little bit at Lake Tennyson before heading out and looking for a place to camp for the night.
Eventually, I found a spot, following a maintenance access road from one power line (that was right off the road) up into the hills to the next power line. I was in the clouds, so I couldn’t really see very far in front of me: I just knew that it was really steep on one side going down and really steep on the other side going up. 🙃
At the bend of the switchback, I did a very careful u-turn, so that if I needed to roll out of that place, for whatever reason, I could at least roll forward and not have to figure out how to roll down that precarious road backward. 🙃
And that was it. Not much in the way of adventures. Restricted views with all the clouds, but still beautiful.
I veged out for a bit more and called it a night.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 