The YHA Hostel was an absolute delight after our night in Queenstown! It was wonderfully quite and dark, except for a beautiful near full moon. Josh didn’t try for any star pictures last night since the moon was bright enough you could almost read by it and we had an early start today.

We had a short drive over to the Tasman Glacier Valley to do a short hike before driving north again. This glacier valley wasn’t as accessible as the Hooker Valley glacier so we headed out on a rough track that was potentially a road. We opted to not drive the rental car down it since it was new and not yet damaged (more on that later…) At some point we decided that we were going to run out of time if we tried to hike to the foot of the glacier, so we found a narrow trail heading up the ridge.

From the top we could see the lagoon and the many small icebergs floating in it. It is hard to visualize the scale of things, especially in the pictures! We we thought were small distances and easy trails turned out to be much longer distances and no trails but valleys! If you look close, you will see that there are people in the rocks! The slope was very steep but Steve kept us safe from rock slides. The guys hiked as close as was deemed safe to get nice pictures of the bluest ice! Our plan was to continue hiking along the edge and meet up with the trail but that was quickly viewed as a bad idea since we still had an 8 hr drive.

We worked our way back to the small saddle we entered from and made our exit without any rock slides! I’m not going to lie, for some reason this short, small, adventure really had me anxious! I guess the idea of being buried under millions of tons of rock gets the adrenaline flowing. It’s not often that Steve shows any stress during adventures so when he says move quickly through an area, I know schist could get real! 😜

We hit the road for F@cking Ferry Day; Part 2 and the big drive back to Picton. A short lunch break introduced me to my new personal hiking logo thanks to Steve and my coffee: “Wake Up, Drink Up, Keep Up”! As we were heading back to the car, I spotted a merino shop and sprinted over in the search for yarn! No yarn was found be we did find the striped thermal shirts that we wore during the kayaking. Unfortunately when I unpacked mine at the end of the day, I had actually purchased a pair of leggings instead of a shirt 🤦‍♀️!

As the sun was setting we stopped to dip our toes in the ocean on the east coast. Ashish was practicing his “old man” stance with quite a bit of success!