Sheila writes:

Got up to find it had snowed overnight and the mountains (through the low cloud) were all white. We hurriedly had a porridge brekkie (!) and went out to walk to the snout of the Hooker Glacier while the weather was dry but still very misty. When we got there the most amazing thing happened - the mist lifted and we got a brilliant view of Mount Cook across the glacier. We felt tiny surrounded by mountains on all sides with summits ranging in elevation from >2000m to My Cook, over 3700m tall! We also walked to the snout of the Tasman Glacier (the longest glacier in New Zealand). It has a glacier lake at its snout with icebergs calving off as the glacier melts. Both glaciers end in the biggest braided rivers I've every seen, ending up in Lake Pukaki to the south.

Mount Cook Village has a really good visitors centre with videos and displays on geology, natural history, historical montaineering in the area and a scale model of the Southern Alps (!!) and we could see that the two glaciers we'd seen earlier were just east and over the watershed from the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers that we'd visited a couple of weeks ago.

We drove north to Lake Tekapo late in the afternoon and saw that all the mountains around the lake were also snow-covered - but we weren't prepared for what happened that night - it snowed again - and we got another 8" of powdery snow - covering our car and carpark and everything. We woke to find a snowy wonderland - with bright blue skies and sunshine. We were so taken with the snow and brilliant weather that we drove back to Lake Pukaki to see the Southern Alps and Mount Cook across the turquoise waters in all their snowy spendour!

Back in Lake Tekapo we climbed up through larch forests and deep snow to the Mount John Observatory overlooking the lake where the University of Otago have applied to get the skies above the lake designated as a World Heritage site for the clarity and beauty of the night sky there. From the observatory you get a 360o view of snow covered mountains and turquose blue lakes - fabulous! It would be very difficult to top these last few days in the Southern Alps for our very good luck with weather and scenery.