Here we have a photo of Aoraki/Mt. Cook in New Zealand’s Southern Alps. This is one of Sir Edmund Hillary’s favorite mountains and his original stomping ground. In the foreground is a little shelter along the trail we were hiking. The weather is notoriously bad around the mountain and it’s rare to get clear days (hence the shelter). We had only one day up there, and as you can see, we couldn’t have been any luckier. We did a gorgeous day hike up to the Tasman Glacier in fresh powder that had fallen the night before and hung out at the base of the glacier in the shadow of Aoraki. Mt. Cook rises 12,300 feet and rivals anywhere in the Rockies in beauty and ruggedness. It was an awesome experience to say the least.

Here is another photo from New Zealand, of Dunedin, the town where I lived for my semester there. Dunedin is a fantastic college town of about 115,000, located on the southeast coast of the South Island. The railway station in the back of the picture is in the Flemish Renaissance style, a popular style in Dunedin which is also seen on the University of Otago campus. This was taken standing on the south edge of the Octagon, Dunedin’s city center, looking south.

I didn’t fully realize it then, but my time in Dunedin began what is now a passion for cities and urban neighborhoods. I spent my time there walking everywhere, from campus to pubs and coffee shops to my friends’ places, and loved it. As a result, I’m now heading to graduate school in August to study urban planning.

This was taken during a spur of the moment road trip through the Catlins region of New Zealand (southeast part of the South Island). It was close to the end of our trip and my buddy Chris and I were lamenting that we hadn’t seen the Catlins, so we set out on a scenic drive from Dunedin to Invercargill and back. It’s a gorgeous area, particularly noted for penguins (which we didn’t see) and waterfalls (which we did). Never having lived outside the middle of the country, living near the ocean was amazing, though rather hard for me to capture photographically. This photo is one of the few that I was relatively pleased with, though the sky is a bit washed out.