Milford Sound
August 19, 2007 on 10:39 am | In Snowboarding |
The weather in Wanaka was not the best in the last few days and the snow conditions in the back country have been very very dangerous due to the very weak layer of snow right at ground level. This has been frustrating as one of the resons we came here is to get film footage in the back country. It is impossible to go out there safely for the time being. I talked to one of the heli guiding operations and they told me that they did some avalanche patrol work last week and dropped nine charges from the helicopter onto snow laden slopes. They caused nine big avalanches. 100% unsafe! New Zealand has an extensive avalanche program, especailly around the ski areas and high passes. The snow conditions here are often unstable due to the fluctuations in weather and temperature. This causes weak layers in the snow where one layer of the snow pack has either melted and re frozen or gathered a layer of frost called hoar. When it snows on top of this weak layer the new layer of snow does not bond well with it. If the top layer becomes too heavy it will just tear away as if it were a large piece of tissue. if this happens, depending on how large the tear is, the whole slope can come down the mountain in a tsnami like snow wave. Weak layers can happen at any level of snowpack but the worst is if the very bottom layer is very weak. If this happens, as it has here now, all the snow that has fallen over the whold season will come down in any slips taking a lot of ground and rocks with it. Not fun.
Anyway, because of the conditions, we decided to do a bit more of the tourist thing and head down to Fiordland in the South of the South Island. We headed to Milford Sound which was the last of the great sea inlets called fiords to be discovered by Europeans here in the South Island. The Fiords are like giant sea lochs with steep mountains either side, carved out when the glaciers retreated after the last ice age around 18000 years ago. They have been used as shelter for boats from big storms for hundreds of years and are now a major tourist attraction as well as home to penguins and fur seals, both of which we were lucky enough to see on our visit. Like the seals that live around the coast of Scotland, the fur seals were just lounging around on the rocks without a care in the world. The pengiuns lived in some scrub land and tussock on one of the gentler shores of the Sound. As well as penguins and fur seals we had a few encounters with the very curious New Zealand alpine parrot the Kea. This beautiful green parrot has red and orange under it’s wings and is very, very inquisitive. The Kea will try and eat anyting humans bring to their habitat, even cars. The one in the picture fancied a bite of my camera before it then tried to eat my hand bag. Pretty funny. I wish we had some parrots in Scotland too!
When we left Wanaka we were very aware of the avalanche danger so when we got to the pass into the Milford valley and saw the signs warning that there was to be no stopping on the road due to avalanche danger we were a little freaked out. We were even more freaked out when we saw the obvious remains of numerous avalanches at the side of the road on the way up although we were driving in the dark. The next day we saw the full extent of the avalanche debris and were pretty awed by the forces of nature so apparent around us. The avalanche in this picture started right at the top of the mountain and carried the snow all the way down past the snow level into the forest below. Scary stuff!!
We are hoping that the conditions stable out in the next few days and we can get out into the back country but for the mean time we are headed back to snowpark and the safety of the park and pipe.
Lesley McKenna
http://www.chunkyknit.com
Professional snowboarder, film maker and ambassador for Visitscotland. All sorts of outdoor sports from skiing to mountain biking and now mixes her time on the Snowboard World Cup Tour with time in Scotland doing these sports.
