Lake Matheson Walk

After our amazeballs helicopter tour of Fox Glacier and Mt. Cook, Tim and I decided to take another look at the mountains, this time from a different perspective.  We heard the Lake Matheson walk had some beautiful mirror images of the mountains... 

Sadly, we were disappointed to see that the lake was not doing much reflecting that day.  But, honestly, after our crazy awesome helicopter flight, pretty much anything would have been somewhat disappointing.  But we had a nice walk anyway:

Lots of fun little things to see in this temperate rainforest, like colorful mushrooms:

Sky rat!  I mean... fancy pigeon.  In New Zealand they call these native pigeons kereru, kuku or kukupa... they're quite large, quite pretty, and not quite as annoying as American pigeons.  Apparently their fruit/seed dispersal is essential to regeneration of native forests.

Lots of cool looking berries:

As we looped around the lake, you could see the clouds our helicopter pilot mentioned making their way over the top of the mountains towards us... a bit ominous!:

Lots of spider webs with cool rain droplets:

And a big-ass spider... this thing was large and in-charge:

The clouds, they're coming!  We got back to the car just in time for the rain to start...