When planning some places to visit with my parents during their visit this summer, we knew that taking them to see Mount Cook should be high on our list of activities. With a long weekend planned in the MacKenzie High Country, it was a short drive over to Mount Cook National Park. All week the weather for the weekend hadn’t been looking very promising for hiking in the mountains, but we were lucky and the day we had picked for hiking turned out to be beautiful.
The drive into Mount Cook National Park is always beautiful, and even the view from the car park is pretty inspiring with the Mount Sefton glacier perched just above the trail head.
The last time Eric and and I hiked the Hooker Valley track, it was August and the middle of winter and so the valley looked quite different. After leaving the car park the trail climbs slightly before you reach the first viewpoint overlooking Mueller Lake.
After taking in the view, we made our way down to the first of the three swing bridges across the Hooker River. After following the river for a while we came around a bend which gave us our first view of Mount Cook at the head of the valley.
The next section of the track follows the Hooker River towards Aoraki / Mount Cook, which is the highest mountain in New Zealand. Although the mountain is shrinking, its height since 2014 is listed as 3,724 metres (12,218 feet), down from 3,764 m (12,349 ft) before December 1991, when a large rockslide and subsequent erosion removed material from the top of the mountain.
As you climb higher into the valley, the track follows a series of board walks across the fragile tussock grass. Although strange to be on such a well made track, it means that you don’t have to watch where you put your feet and so you can take time to look around as you walk.
As we reached the final swing bridge over the Hooker River, the clouds started to spill over the surrounding mountains into the Hooker Valley.
The final section of the track climbs steeply, before rounding a corner from where you get a great view along Hooker Lake towards Mount Cook. We made our way down to the lake shore for a picnic lunch and as we sat in the warm sun the clouds drifted past the peak of Mount Cook giving us the occasional glimpse of the summit.
Unlike in August when the lake was almost entirely covered in ice, this time there were just a few small chunks of ice floating on the surface of the lake. The valley echoed with the sound of water, from the waterfalls that lined the valley walls. After lunch we made our way back down the track, retracing our steps to the trail head before heading off to explore another part of the park.