Welcome Flats

I went tramping this weekend. The beginning and end of my backpacking career. We hiked the Copeland Track to Welcome Flats Hut, which is in Glacier country on the west coast of the South Island (of New Zealand, although if you don't know that's where I am you probably shouldn't be reading my blog). It was a six and a half hour hike to the hut, but we left late and did the last hour and a half in the dark, which I found pretty scary. The very end had a difficult river crossing which was very icy and I ended up getting soaked to the waist. Our party was movng slow and I began to get very cold and scared, although fortunalty we knew at that point that the hut was not more than 20 mins away. Yet we went so slowly, I thought I was going to freeze to death. Even then, our leader felt it was necessary to try to kill every possum we came across with rocks, and I tell this just to illustrate the Kiwi hatred for the possums.

Physically, I did pretty well. I was impressed that I was able to keep up pretty well, even though I had never carried a pack before. I must be in better shape than I thought.

It was a bit scary. I kept thinking the whole way in the dark "I don't want to do this again." But the rest of the weekend went quite smoothly. We spent Sunday staying warm in the hot pools outside the hut, which were really nice (see the picture above). At that point there was snow all over the mountainside, because it snowed on Sat night. Monday was beautiful and we had a lovely hike out, and got home by 10pm. God really blessed our weekend, and I am very grateful for that. We didn't even get rain, and we were on the west coast for four days! I'm really glad I went, although I don't think I'll be doing any more overnight tramping in the future. In any case, it was a good finale to my adventures in New Zealand, and now I have the next week to take exams and bring closure to a bunch of things before I head back home.

On a side note, I have the sweetest Dad ever. Because I'm going to have a ten hour layover in LA on the way back, he booked me a hotel room with a king size bed!! Gosh. I am going to stretch my wee body out and use every inch of it.