Noah's Ark: The Sequel

Fellow hut friends huddled around a mountain radio in Blue Lake Hut listening for the weather forecast and hoping for good news. None, rain, rain, and more rain.

I could have swore that God promised to not destroy the earth by floods after that whole Noah's Ark deal. After this last trip I'm not sure that he isn't rethinking that decision. The forecast wasn't terrible when we started out. Some heavy rains at first and then some light showers for a couple days. Wrongo dongo my friend. It rained for six straight days. The forecasters got the heavy rains nailed but they missed the hail and snow. Long story short it rained harder than I have ever seen it rain before. The rains came down and the rivers went up. The rivers can rise one meter an hour. Yikes. So we had to abort our originial trip itinerary which required a river crossing that would have resulted in our immediate deaths. We went with Plan B which didn't involve a river crossing and therefore we got to live some more. Really wasn't a tough decision. But the last two days of the trip made up for the previous six days of torrential rain. So I guess God decided to not destroy the earth after all. On our last night on Lake Angelus there was a sweet rainbow disappearing down into the canyon we had just hiked up. We thought about releasing a dove to see what it would return but we didn't have any :)
We are off to Abel Tasman National Park for some sea kayaking and then Kahurangi National Park for some more hiking. Somewhere in between we are going to come back to Nelson to celebrate my birthday, then off to the North Island for the last bit of our trip. Enjoy the pics :)View from Robert's Ridge looking down at Lake Angelus and Lake Angelus Hut.

Our last day hiking out Robert's Ridge.

Rainbow behind lovely alpine lake. We took this as a good sign that God had found some good people again on this earth.

Living the dream above yet another alpine lake we found.

Some more of the same, but yet different.

Lake Angelus. View from Lake Angelus Hut where we stayed with 40 of our closest friends. Crazy. There might be another blog entry someday about my thoughts of placing a huge hut right by an amazing alpine lake.

The track we had just come up, and the stream coming out of Lake Angelus.

We had actually just come down from Travers Saddle when we read this sign. Maybe we weren't prepared, I guess we will never know.