The Remarkables...

This was an interesting trip. I don't know that I would exactly say that it was remarkable in any good ways, but it wasn't the end of the world. So the interesting/horrible thing about this trip was that they split us into 2 groups. One group starts on one end and the other on the other end and we meet in the middle and trade keys for the vans. The other important fact is that one group was going downhill the whole way, while the other group was going uphill most of the way. Guess what group Missy got put in. Yep. The hard one. Go figure. And this was a backpacking trick so we were carrying all of our gear on our backs again. Fun.So our guide was Tony, who is awesome, and the New Zealand version of Steve Irwin. He knows lots of things about birds and plants and various animals.So the day starts off with me already on the hard side of things. Climbing uphill and uphill and uphill I was getting pretty tired and not happy. It wasn't so awful because fortunately the trail leveled out after awhile, so that was nice. We walked for about 3 hours that day before we made camp. That night we mostly just hung out around camp and watched the stars that night. They are truly beautiful here, and the skies are so open and clear to see them.The next morning more adventure began. We were walking a long, crashing through bush, because as I forgot to mention earlier we weren't on a trail, we were bushwacking. So as were walking along Becky falls into a hidden hole, and really hurts her ankle. Since we are in the middle of the mountains, there was no way she could walk out. So JJ and Julianne ran back to the other group (the ones going the easy way) to find Jason (our instructor) to tell him about Becky's ankle and to get a helicopter to come pick her up. Meanwhile, Heidi and Becky set up a tent so the helicopter could find them. Then the rest of the group continued on. The rest of the hike was misery that day because we had to go up this hugely STEEP rock pile to get to the top of the mountain. Not pleasant. But what I learned at that part of the trip, I can do hard things. We always joke about that in our group and say it sarcastically, but it really is amazing what you can do when you don't have a lot of choice.So we arrive at camp on the top of a mountain by a lake, where there are FREEZING strong winds and it's ice cold and starting to rain. So we all attempt to put up our tents in this crazy wind and then got into our tents, put on our dry clothes, and didn't move out of our tents until the next morning. Our water was even brought to us so we could make our dinner. Basically we were curled up in our sleeping bags from 3:00 pm on.So as we are sitting in our tents and bags freezing, we suddenly hear this whot whot whot, and we all stick our heads out of the tent and there is the helicopter and it's dropping Heidi off. So they through out her bag and she hops out all legit. So cool! Heidi got the best end of the deal because she got a free helicopter ride, without having to sprain her ankle, and she missed climbing the steep hill.That nights sleep wasn't terribly nice, because there were 4 of us crammed into to small of a tent and the wind kept blowing the tent poles down onto us. I don't think anyone in our group slept for more than a half an hour at the time. Then after a miserable nights sleep we woke up to freezing cold to find that our wet boots, are frozen solid. Rock solid. You can't put your feet into your boots solid. So we all put our feet halfway into our boots and are walking around trying to get them melted slightly enough so we could shove our feet in. It took a while for our shoes to completely melt. The rest of the day was pretty nice though. Not to rainy and cold and at the end of the hike we got to stop and get Ferg Burgers. So that was delightful and probably the highlight of this trip.