Finding Mount Cook

In between visiting the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers we spent a night on a remote DoC campsite at Gillespie's Beach on the wild West coast. It was remote because we had to drive kilometres down an unsurfaced road again to reach it (although it was nowhere near as corrugated as the track to Raspberry Creek at the start of the Rob Roy Glacier walk) and the road twisted and turned interminably through thick native forest.
The road came to a dead end at the campsite which was separated from the beach, and sheltered from the stiff breeze off the Tasman Sea, by a barrier of hardy shrubs.
We went for a walk along the beach. The land ran steeply away into a grey sea which rolled in and crashed onto the shore.
Although the rain had stopped the sky was overcast and the wet, grey sand ended in a high, grey shingle bank topped with the pale grey skeletons of hundreds of pieces of driftwood. The wood was of all shapes and sizes but included many salt-laden tree trunks complete with stiff branches.

By nightfall the small site was crammed with campervans (most smaller than ours) and cars being used as sleeping accommodation as well as a means of transport.

We drove out of the site before dawn and before anyone else was awake. We were in search of the clear view of Mount Cook - the highest mountain in NZ and Australia) that had eluded us on the bank of Lake Pukaki on the other side of the Mount Cook National Park. A sunrise walk around Lake Matheson brought our reward.