Our last day! 😭 We spend our last day true to The Plan and headed out early to hike in a podocarp forest. The Te-Whaiti-Nui-A-Toi Canyon area is a beautiful example of an ancient forest. There were tree ferns everywhere and giant towering trees looming over the top. We hiked for 8 miles on the waterfall loop track, getting nice pictures of the trees.

 

 

Ashish might have searched for inner peace on Conical Peak, but he found it on a bed of soft green moss in the forest!

The main draw to this loop was the canyon area, a short water carved corridor in the rocks. Josh was able to get this amazing picture using a 2 min 25 sec exposure! The sky was mostly cloudy but I’m still super impressed with how it came out!

We lunched at our room in the Flaxy and then headed out for the Kerosene Creek. This is a natural hot creek, due to all of the thermally active areas around here. While it is a touristy area, it is still really cool! Steve found the less traveled one and the creek is large enough that we didn’t feel crowded at all. It is such a bizarre thing to me to wade and float in a creek that is warm like a hot tub! The water did smell a bit like kerosene but it wasn’t that bad.

It was a pretty fabulous way to end an epic trip, soaking with good friends in naturally hot water! This trip has been amazing!