Flower Friday . . . Alpine Wild Flowers

After a comfortable nights sleep in the little hut we set off driving south.  A stop at Lake Tennyson mid morning was where  the forester remembered today is our 44th wedding anniversary.  I had forgotten.  Our friend Sandra who is travelling with us picked these wee orange flowers and gave them to me.  Even in the wop wops a girl gets anniversary flowers.  The extra is wild Borage growing and Lake Tennyson is in the background.  There were a profusion of flowers and grasses.  Before that stop the road climbed to Island Saddle the highest public road in New Zealand at 1,347 m or 4,419 ft above sea level).   Later in the morning we turned north onto the Acheron Road.  This is the route established by Maori and told to the early settlers, who well into the 20th century drove their stock over the high passes from Marlborough and Nelson to Canterbury.  This area is now Molesworth Station.  The landscape is slightly more gentle and I could see why the settlers thought it would be suitable for farming.  Not always a happy story of course when you march into a landscape and burn the natural land cover and try growing grass and introducing sheep to a delicate ecosystem.  Between 1938 and 1949 the land went back to the Government because of rabbit infestation, stock losses in disastrous snowfalls, and economic recession. The station has remained in Crown ownership and gradually recovered from its earlier desolation, thanks to extensive rabbit control and over-sowing of some 37,000 ha in the 1950s and 60s.  We camped at the Molesworth camp ground and did have to put up the tent. 2nd extra is the Molesworth Station farm buildings.