Nice View

It was Greg's day off today (Tuesday) so he decided to go for a walk up into the Wye Creek catchment area and took along his gun just in case. There had been a heavy snow fall overnight which made everything look like a postcard first thing in the morning. There is still a good snow base up on the hills, which is still making it difficult to get up to where the deer are but he did manage to shoot a "100 year old billy goat" (in his words). Apparently it smelt 100 years old too and had a good set of horns on it. Unfortunately he forgot to take a photo of it in the excitement as it took off into the scrub and took some chasing down!

Wye Creek rises steeply up from lake level to nearly 2000m and makes for some spectacular scenery, as seen below:

Looking back towards Queenstown - the first peninsula on the right is Jack's Point and the second one is Kelvin Heights

Looking towards Cecil Peak. And yes, that's the road at the bottom of the picture. "Rising Steeply" is an understatement! These photos were taken from about halfway up.

Daley's Flat Hut

We looked at the weather forecast on Friday and decided it looked nice for a tramp, but still a bit cold for tenting, so we decided to walk from Chinaman's Bluff (at a place called Paradise, near Glenorchy) up the lower Dart to Daley's Flat Hut. The signposts said 3 1/2 to 5 1/2 hours each way, summer tramping time. It took us about 5 hours in each direction, but that included looking around each of the grassy flats for deer sign (and following the odd stream up to the tops) and also crossing the odd fallen tree.

The tramp was a pretty hard slog in places - it varied between beech forest bluffs and large grassy flats. The following photo shows where we stopped for lunch on the way in.

When we reached Sandy Bluff, there was a fantastic sign that said "Sheer drop offs for next 200m, then track decends steeply". This next photo was taken from the top of one of the sheer drop offs - looking out over Dredge Flat.

We did see a couple of deer - Greg got pretty close to a big stag - but the wind was behind us so he didn't have a hope of getting a clear shot at it without it bolting. And as the last thing you want to do is injure the deer, he let it bolt! We also went for a walk in the evening to see what was further up the valley and saw a deer up there - but it was on the other side of a large flat surrounded by scrub and again no clear shot.

We don't know how valuable a hunting area it will be - at the moment it's still really frosty in the mornings so nothing for the deer to feed on, but by the time the frosts are over it's peak tramping season and the track is really busy. A great experience none-the-less and with the blisters we had on the way out, we're almost glad we weren't carrying a deer!

Dilemma

Greg was going to mow the lawn this morning........

But there appears to be a minor technical difficulty