Mt. Cook, 1

After Edoras we drove to a campground on Lake Tekapo, one of several very large turquoise lakes emanating from the Southern Alps. Next day we drove up to Mt. Cook, a sight we had missed on our 2008-2009 New Zealand visit (bad weather). Mt. Cook is the highest of the Southern Alps, only 12,000-something feet, but still a famous and formidable mountain...in the same range, altitude-wise, with Mt. Robson, the Grossglockner, the Eiger, etc. Anyhow, I wanted to see it and especially the Sir Edmund Hillary Alpine Center located in the Mt. Cook village there. Hillary—known as Sir Ed among New Zealanders—was, with the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, the first to climb Mt. Everest, back in 1953, part of the great expedition led by Lord Hunt. Hillary had a variety of further adventures later in life, but he is best remembered for Everest and for his subsequent devotion to the Nepalese, building schools, hospitals, airfields, and so on. He is revered in Nepal as well as in New Zealand, and among mountaineers everywhere.

Lake Tekapo; similar to the Finger Lakes, it and its neighbor,
Lake Pukaki; there are huge lakes all over the South Island,
mostly east of the big mountains

Traveling with children; the twin 10-month-olds are in the
carriage

Looking up Lake Pukaki, Mt. Cook, still 20 miles or so away 

Closer

Climbers on a wall near the Village

Closer

"Big mountains make their own weather," episode #9,229

While the weather was still decent, we decided to do the
Hooker Valley day-hike, said to be New Zealand's finest

Lunch, sitting on a promontory, watching avalanches off an
adjacent mountain

One several cable bridges

Hooker Creek and afternoon weather

The goal: Hooker Glacier and Hooker Lake

Icebergs off the glacier

Thus

And thus

New Zealand daisies along the trail