As we left the the Invincible Mine and the Rees Valley to return to Glenorchy, we stopped to look across to the Dart and Routeburn Valleys where we would be hiking a couple of days later. The early autumn storm that was in the forecast looked to have already started to move in with the valleys both choked with cloud.
With the sky quickly clouding over, we decided we had time to do a short stroll around the Glenorchy lagoon after lunch. The track left from the small town and took us across boardwalks and raised tracks through the wetlands just out of town.
Almost all native trees and shrubs in New Zealand are evergreen, therefore it is unusual to see large swaths of autumn colour. With the warm sun and gold and orange bushes and grasses it really felt like the seasons were changing.
As we looped back around to the start of the track we could see the approaching storm whipping up the water and dust in the river valleys above the lake and the moisture building.
We got back to Lake Wakatipu in Glenrochy and walked out to the wharf to watch the incoming storm. The unusually shaped lake (it looks like a backwards letter ‘N’), is New Zealand’s longest at around 80 kilometres (50 miles)long. Although we have been past the busy section of the lake near Queenstown, we had never driven along the winding road to this quiet end of the lake.
Next to the Glenorchy wharf was the brightly coloured goods shed, a relic from the days when Glenorchy and Queenstown were connected via steam ship from the late 1870s. With only one company running goods and passengers into and out of Queenstown, complaints about the level of service and cost of freight led to the service being taken over by the New Zealand Railways from around 1902.
In around 1908, the goods shed was moved from the wharf to the current location and New Zealand’s shortest railway line was laid from the end of the wharf to the shed to allow the steamers to be unloaded.
With the storm building, we decided it was time to head back to our cabin for the night and hunker down for a quiet evening before starting our Great Walk.