Road trip to Arthur's Pass
As we had a poor snowboarding experience at Mt Cheeseman and left the ski fields after two hours, we had a half a day for exploring Springfield’s area.
The weather wasn’t so perfect and days still got dark quite soon, so we decided to do a road trip and see what interesting is along the road.
We were heading off to the West Coast and our first stop was at Cave Stream Scenic Reserve. It’s a nice place with a 30-minute loop walk when we could observe how the stream cut its path through the adjacent hills and enjoyed some nice views from several lookouts.
As its name indicates, the reserve is a good spot for caving. With a proper equipment, you can start to follow the stream at one end and walk through the cave to the other end which is about 500m upstream. We missed that, but there were some people who dared to do this adventurous.
After another 10 minutes of the drive, we got off at Lake Pearson. It’s easily accessible and although close to the main road, it’s a nice peaceful place which is popular for fishing and bird watching. Our bird watch catch was…three ducks!
The next short turn-off we made to Waimakariri River where we crossed the White Bridge and followed the river for a while. The views of the river are impressive especially during nice days from a top of the mountains when you can see its arms rushing and weaving through each other all the way long to the coast of Christchurch.
In Arthur’s Pass, there was nothing really interesting and as the clouds still sit on the hills, the only nice views were on the postcards which we bought in a local shop.
On the way back to Springfield, we stopped at the Craigieburn Forest Park and did the Mistletoe track. But as it started to getting dark we didn’t reach the top of the track and had to turn back to the carpark. Nevertheless, we needed some time for relaxing anyway, because the next day in the morning, the day full of wonderful snowboarding awaited for us!