The Glory of Milford Sound

I visited Milford Sound today...a notch off my bucket list.  WOW!  The Lizards were out of their natural desert habitat, but I won the weather lottery.  I enjoyed a crystalline, sunny day in a place that receives 264 inches of rain a year!

The Sound from land.  The arrow shaped peak in the middle is Mitre Peak, which rises over 5500 feet directly from the sea.

On the Sound.  BTW, it's actually a fjord, caused by glaciers carving a gorge during the Ice Age.  This was a nature oriented cruise, and our American accented guide explained geology, fauna and flora, and even meteorology of the sound to us. 

Looking behind.  Notice how CLEAR the air is!  It's been like that ever since I arrived in New Zealand.  Being islands, with no huge cities, and plenty of wind and atmospheric mixing, smog and even haze are not big issues here.  NZ has had other environmental issues, but air quality is not high on the list...it's great.

Fur sloats hanging out on a rock.  They pick windy spots to avoid the sandflies, which otherwise plague all beasts.  I have many sandfly bites as souvenirs...mostly around my ankles.  Damn bolshevik ankle biters!!

Sterling Falls, almost 500 feet high.  Our fairly small cruise boat was able to sail right under the falls!  The water just a few yards from shore is hundreds of feet deep.  This cascade is perennial, fed by glaciers on Mt Pembroke.  Our guide was kind of disappointed it hadn't rained much lately...when it does the sound has dozens of waterfalls like this one.  Today, only two...both glacier fed.

Here's Mount Pembroke, rising just over 2000 metres.  Our narrator saw a chunk of the glacier fall off earlier today...projections are for it to be gone in 50 years.  But it's still picturesque at the moment.  This of course is late summer in NZ, near the minimum for snow cover in the mountains.  In 4-6 weeks a new winter snowpack will begin developing.

This is the other perennial waterfall in Milford Sound, Bowen Falls...like Stirling, about 500 feet high.  I have many more pictures of Milford, and the mountain scenery enroute to the sound was also spectacular!  More posts coming.  I can only say that I cannot remember ever spending a day immersed in more natural beauty than today.  Cruising the inside passage of British Columbia is similar. Yosemite is similar.  Neither is better than this place...all three grade out at A plus plus.  It was a privilege to be able to see Milford Sound.