The View from Key Summit

Carol and Roger finally made it to the South Island’s famous mountains and Fjiordland National Park...all 2.6 million hectares of this UNESCO World Heritage Site.  All of it eye candy.

Mountains formed when the same tectonic plates that cause Seattle's earthquakes crashed into one another millions of years ago....

...made more dramatic when glaciers cut deep valleys during the last ice age.  If the tectonic action in the Washington Cascades is a 10, these mountains are a 99.  Look on a full-sized map and you will see range after range of mountains all very close together in every direction.

Hundreds of creeks fed the big rivers that emptied into the fjords on the west coast.  Some of those streams were crossed by what Kiwis call “wire bridges”…these 3-wire structures are unique New Zealand (thankfully).  If the photo were not somewhat backlit, you would see the ferro on Carol's face.  She got out a few meters and promptly turned around for the photo.  

We stopped en route to Milford Sound to hike up to Key Summit, where the views were supposed to be spectacular.  The trail switch-backed steeply, first through deep forest...

...then through sub-alpine scrub

 

At the top, the views were as good as promised.  

From the summit, you could see up three different glacial valleys.

 

At the top is an alpine meadow…above the tree-line…with a large bog where the plants were slowly being turned into peat.

And to cap things off, at a parking lot later in the day, we saw our first Kea…a parrot unique to New Zealand's Southern Alps and Fjords.