Treble Cone debacle

I woke up on my beach ready to face the day.  I'm not normally a swimmer, far from it. But this morning, for some reason, the perfectly clear and sure to be frigid water appealed to my sense of adventure.  I jumped in, actually swam for a bit, rinsed off some smell and jumped back into my sleeping bag to warm up.  

I was the only one that took advantage of sleeping on the beach.

We drove through Wanaka and toward some day hiking.  I slept in the car ride for a while, and it's always a pleasant surprise when you wake up in a really beautiful place, ready to take a hike.  We couldn't go where we really wanted unfortunately, the road was too long and too gravelly for our poor little van, so we instead turned toward a place called Treble Cone, a ski resort.  We went through a gate that someone had opened for us, read the signs that said "drive at your own risk, not maintained out of season", and began a steep ascent toward the resort.  Along the way we noticed a paraglider.  Then several paragliders. Later my parents spoke with someone who told them about a paragliding week long competition.  

Two ways for humans to fly.

Watch out dude!

 We parked at the main lodge where all the ski routes end and had lunch.  There was a lot of construction and a sign saying not to go past this point, and the parking lots A and C were closed after 4:00pm.  So we wrote a note in our window saying we'd be back by 6:30 to fetch our vehicle, made sure not to park it in the A or C lot, and headed off.  We went up a green route, figuring the easiest to ski down would be the easiest to hike up.  Kelly and Dan quickly out hiked us, and we entertained ourselves by finding trinkets along the way.  I found a few coins, then Mom did, and soon we were finding all sorts of goodies.  I think I found six dollars worth in all.  It really helps that New Zealand has one and two dollar coins.  Our luck was to change however, near the top we reached a sort of road, and two guys were driving down.  The first guy on a four wheeler stopped to politely and sort of apologetically say that the road up to the resort was going to be closed and locked in half an hour, but I should ask the next guy to make sure.  The next guy in a truck, and probably the supervisor of the first, was not so polite and certainly not apologetic.  "The sign is very clear, the road closes at 4:30." "The main road? On the bottom of the hill?" "Yes."  "When?"  "I'm driving down right now, and I'm going to lock it."  He did suggest that if the paragliders were still there, they have their own lock and could let us out.  Otherwise, well, we were on our own, and they would be back through at ten the next morning to open it.  Well we had hiked several hours to get to where we were and he didn't offer to take one of us down to move our van, so, we were just going to have to make the best of it.

Dad takes in the incredible view at the top.  We all decided, that even if we were to get locked in, or in some sort of trouble, it would be worth it for the view.  Probably.

Another view from the top.

I wonder if this plant appreciates the vastness around it?

One of the treasures I found along the trail was this little guy.  I saw only his feet sticking up out of the mud, but I knew from only that what it was, "it's a skeleton Lego!"  Sure enough.  It looked like he had been glued to something, I'm imagining skis or a helmet.  I think a lot of people lost things on the slopes and nobody found them because they were buried in snow.  Now that the snow is all gone, it's a great time to find money etc.

When we got to the bottom of the hill we noticed that yes, the sign is very clear.  Whoops.

One of the locks was a four number combination lock.  Knowing it to be a limited number of possibilities, we each sat down, for varying amounts of time to try out combinations in sequence.  

It was tedious yes, but we really had nothing else to do. And we sort of wanted to be out of there before 10 when the workers came back the next morning.  At least the views were great.

We also had a covered cooking and eating spot in the bus stop.  To my Kiwi friends who call 'counters' 'benches', this was really cooking on a bench!

The stars were great that night. I tried taking pictures of them as Kelly worked her fingers to blisters looking for the right combination.

Spoiler alert:  We didn't get the combination, though we went through and tried every possibility.  Obviously, and unsurprisingly to me, someone got the right number, but it wasn't exactly right, or it wasn't pulled exactly right.  Sigh.  Possibly a waste of time, but at  least we can say we tried.