Day 11 - Cascade Saddle

The plan was to hike to a ridge above our camp that boasted great views of the valley and mountains.  The expected time to our destination was 5 hours.  It was a classic NZ hike - no definite trail just markers every once in awhile, lots of climbing over roots and rocks and straight up.  Once we got out of the trees, it got even steeper with lots of boulders and scree.  

Awesome views of the valley below.  If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can see some specks in the grass on the bottom left of the picture.  That is the tents.  

The other direction down the valley.

A little walk out to a beautiful view.

We saw many of these Mountain Buttercups along the way.

 Sam caught up with us and we hiked with him for awhile.  After about 4 hours of hiking, we hit some snow fields and crossed them but didn't feel comfortable without more equipment to go to the very top. It was very steep and we had already gotten the great views, so we didn't feel it was worth the risk.  Sam kept going.  We stopped for lunch at a cool spot on the way down and ran into Emmett on his way up.  We got back to camp around 4pm.  We were exhausted after a grueling hike but wanted to take advantage of the beautiful day so we made an early dinner and rested our feet for a little bit and then did  a valley hike to the Shovel Flats.  Flat sounded very good to me.

It was cool to see the same views we had just looked at from above now looking up at them.

This was the Mt Aspiring area but this is Mt Joffre.

As we were walking back to camp, we heard a noise behind us and looked back to see an avalanche on Mt Joffre.  If you zoom in you can see the snow falling from the cliff on the face of the mountain.

This was a sign at the hut that showed the names of the peaks in the area.  It was built by the family of someone that died climbing in the area.

This is the little shelter where we cooked our meals.  There was also a spigot for water.  When we got back Sam had made it back to camp. Emmett had turned around shortly after we met up with him because it was too steep.  He decided to move his camp down the valley to the area where we had just hiked.

This is a view from the shelter of our tent.  The buildings in the distance are the wardern's hut, a hut for trampers and bathrooms (with running water).  We chose to use our tent because we thought we'd sleep better. It was so quiet.  There was a river nearby and other than that, all you could hear was the wind.  I loved reading at night in the tent.  

We chatted with Sam for awhile and then headed to bed exhausted.