Key Summit - On The Way Up

After driving south and west to Te Anau through Southland we continued north along Lake Te Anau and the Eglinton River valley, along the inland edge of Fiordland National Park. We stopped for lunch just past Lake Gunn, at an access point for the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealand's "great" hikes. After lunch we headed up the track to Key Summit, about an hour and a half up the trail. And I do mean "up" the trail; it was a good warm-up hike for what was to come later in the trip.

We headed up through a rainforest similar to the forests near Te Anau where some of the scenes for Fangorn Forest in the Lord Of The Rings movies were shot. We saw several small streams and waterfalls and started to get familiar with the flora of the area.


The weather had cleared up splendidly throughout the day, so we had some fine views on the way up. The peaks that are normally shrouded in clouds were silhouetted against a clear blue sky. Along the way someone asked Regan what a particular mountain peak was, and he said "I have no idea. I've never seen it before!"


As we got above the tree line we stopped to soak in the view. Notice the moon rising over the peaks of the Humboldt Mountains just above Claudia's head.


I posted the full 360+ degree panorama from near Key Summit previously (on January 8), but here is another smaller 2-frame panorama of just the Darran Mountains across the Hollyford Valley. Mount Christina (2502 m) is on the left generating a cloud off the top.