New Zealand Maymester 2017!

Today was a great day. After a nourishing breakfast, we convoyed to the Hermitage Hotel where we embarked on a spectacular day long traverse up the mountain. The first thirty minutes of flat terrain gave us some false confidence about the trail that lay ahead. We turned on to Sealy Tarns trail and began our ascent on the seemingly endless stairs. We hiked at an aggressive pace and took small breaks every 10 minutes or so, and after 300+ m of ascent we asked Dan if we were close to the top, and he informed us we'd made it about half the way. After a couple hours of our best mountain goat impressions we made it to a beautiful lunch spot overlooking two bright blue lakes and the Tasman Glacier. We ate our sandwiches at a picnic table surrounded by tarns, which are essentially just little lakes that are created by glaciers and collect rainwater. Then we decided to continue upward even though the groomed trail had ended. We saw some incredible conglomerates with beautifully metamorphose...

The morning was just like any other as we all woke up and were eating breakfast in the common room of the lodge by 8 AM. The fog was intense, and we all piled into the cube van and the smaller motor vehicle around 8:30, not knowing what the weather would be like for the rest of the day. We were GABE’d out as we made our way to Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park. We stepped out of the van to a cool -1 °C. The group began the morning by walking over to the sunlight and engaged in our first ever morning calisthenics session, leaving our sore bodies very grateful. Once we were alive, awake, alert, and enthusiastic, we hiked about a kilometer up sheer stairs to a spot that overlooked Tasman Lake, where we toured yesterday on boats. At the lookout, Dan described our task of the day: discovering the relative ages of three moraines we would visit over the day. We could do this using by measuring lichen diameter on rocks, because the size of the growing lichen indicates that the larger it is (and ...

Dawn in Twizel on the edge of Lake Pukaki brought us foggy morning air and the classic maymester breakfast spread. Hopping into the van and soob 2.0, we careened through dismal weather and progressively crushed hopes along the highway, climbing in altitude. Nonetheless, morning clouds lifted onto beautiful vistas of the lakeside and the day was saved! We stopped mostly to look at a sheep farm that happened to sit above a huge flat gravel area. As a understandably confused sheep farmer brought his dogs past us and closed the gate, we determined we were looking at a glacial outwash plain. Next we took off to an overlook above a menagerie of braided rivers fed by the glacial melt as we got more and more hyped to see the glacier we keep hearing about. Up the mountain in amazing sun we reached the Hermitage lodge and flanks of Mt cook. After seeing the lodge, a favorite of Sir Edmund Hillary, we hopped on a bus with a cranky driver (made us appreciate our own chauffeurs!) before a short...

After our adventurous free day in Queenstown, Dan treated us to a late morning. With a 9:30 departure, we hit the road to our next stop, a small town called Twizel. Most of the drive was in a gorge along the fault between the Pacific and Australian plates, which created beautiful mountains surrounding each side of the road following New Zealand’s Southern Alps. We took one scenic highway-side detour before arriving at our intended destination: the south end of Lake Pukaki, a glacial lake running from the foothills of Mount Cook down about 50 km south. We made sandwiches with baguettes and toppings brought in the cooler, and ate them while admiring the uniquely blue water from the boulders of the dammed end of Lake Pukaki. Here Dan gave us a basic introduction to glaciers, which are our focus for the next week in the South Island. Glaciers can be thought of as flowing bodies of ice, which carry rock and debris “downstream.” At higher altitudes, snow collects and compacts into ice, addin...

Woke up bright and early and started cleaning the lodge we were staying in. After taking out the trash, tidying the rooms, and carrying all our bags down the steep scoria hill, we packed into the cars and headed for Auckland. After 5 hours of listening to Tom's authentic New Zealand music, we arrived at the airport an hour before our flight. We were shocked when security only took 5 minutes, we had the luxury of getting to leave our shoes on and got to take through as many liquids as we wanted. We were also never asked for identification (yikes!). We had an absolutely lovely flight with Air New Zealand, watching the sunset over the horizon as we said goodbye to the North Island. Some of our favorite parts of the flight included the hilarious informational video, the complementary wine, and the assortment of cheeses. After landing in Queenstown and grabbing our bags, we piled into an identical white van and drove to our motel - The Pinewood Lodge. Us kids had a delicious dinner at t...

We woke up after a night spent at the Hotel Skotel Holiday Inn in good spirits. The showers were heated, the breakfast was plentiful, and we were ready for a full day in the field, even after being separated from our home sweet Snowline. Our first stop was along the road on the way to the Mangatepopo Valley Tongariro Crossing Trailhead. We did not know what to expect, but we definitely did not expect to foray through the bushes and newly formed snow from the day before. As we scaled up the mountain, we took a stop at an outcrop, where we whipped out our handy dandy notebooks and went to town on our STC to analyze this mysterious structure. Through our observations, we were able to determine that the layers in the outcrop were deposited at an angle, facing into the side of the mountain. Although the individual layers were well-sorted, there was a wealth of grain sizes, ranging from very fine sand-sized material to very coarse, cobble-like clasts. We decided that the layers we were s...

Today we woke up to an unusual surprise – about 5 cm of windblown snow that had accumulated throughout the night. Although Mt. Ruapehu looked like a spectacular winter wonderland from our window, we began packing layers on layers (six for some people) and trundled down the hill from our ski lodge, resembling the kids from A Christmas Story. Our assignment seemed fairly simple for the day - create a detailed map of the geology of a valley at the base of Mount Ngauruhoe, which some might know as Mount Doom from the Lord of the Rings. Mount Doom seemed an appropriate name as we worked through five different elements of rain, sleet, hail, snow, and as Lydia describes, “snail,” a mix of it all. We ventured out to the valley at the base of the mountain for some mapping, armed with only tracing paper and a map. As we hiked several kilometers through the valley, we examined features such as topography, vegetation, and the texture, structure, and composition of the rocks we saw. By examining th...