Now I was feeling healthy and rested. A week in Franz Joseph to get over my cold and a week in Christchurch to take in some art and culture. I hit the trail again with refreshed and renewed. Nelson was the new fulcrum around which this was to take place and it had a very different feel. Even though it's not a big town, its position in the middle of the country makes it feel more tuned in than the far flung communities around the southwestern edge.
First up was by far the best of the three I did in this area, Roberts Ridge to Lake Angelus. The mountains are so steep there are very few ridgeline or mountaintop hikes. To this point Kepler had been the only one. This was the second. It's used as a kind of back-country ski area in the winter and ridgeline hikes always feel like a walk in the sky. The track gets rougher before descending to a bowl where Lake Angelus and the Angelus Hut are located. It wasn't anything special from above but watching the sunrise over the lake the next day was one of those times I couldn't stop taking photos partly because I just wanted it to last forever.
After I got back to Nelson I had a few extra days to kill before my reservations on the Heaphy Track kicked in so I found a hiking track south of town and spent a couple of days exploring. It's a beautiful track and suffers only in comparison to its world class companions elsewhere in the country. And that was with a day and half of rain. I think I spent one day sitting by a coal fired stove in one of the huts. Their environmentalism can have its limits and it made the rainwater collected from the roof taste kind of funny.
Finally it was time for the Heaphy Track. A few years prior, there had been a Heaphy family at Camp Fernwood who enrolled their daughter but never showed up. So I couldn't resist making the track a search for the elusive Heaphys hence the one really goofy picture of me looking for something on the trail. It was a nice hike but I didn't think it was in the same class as most of the other Great Walks. The walk along the beach was much easier and well built than the Hump Track and it was a nice walk back inland but nothing to write home about and certainly not as good as Roberts Ridge to Lake Angelus.From there I spent a couple of days in Takaka before getting on the ferry to North Island