Journey From Arthur's Pass To The West Coast

Andrew lent me his car to explore Greymouth and the west coast of the South Island, while he entertains Canadian friends this weekend at the bach (aka crib; hut; shack; cabin) at Arthur's Pass. The descent down the Otira Gorge was lovely! The road parallels the railroad. The road often narrows to one lane at bridges, and there is one bridge where the railroad joins the pavement for a single lane across the water.

It's astonishing just how broad these valleys are, with their wide, wide gravelly beds with intertwined channels. These rivers can, and sometimes do, ferry vast volumes of water to the sea.

Still, the mountains are somewhat vague about their glacial past. The hanging valleys are small and obscure, and there are no U-shaped valleys, suggesting that even in Ice Age conditions, this location isn't heavily glaciated (unlike the conditions in the SW South Island of Zealand, in Fiordland).

Approaching the coast, the vegetation changed, from beeches and tussock, to cabbage trees, Nikau palms (the southernmost palms in the world), and a wide variety of ferns (sometimes alive and sometimes as vast beds of crumpled dead and dying ferns). More jungly. Epiphytic plants grow on all the trees.

The west coast is typically wetter than the east coast, but people are complaining all over the South Island about how dry things are now. Still, it's all relative - it's pretty wet by AZ/NM standards.