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IT’S often said that autumn, winter, and spring make for the best outdoor photographs, because the low sun (when there is sun!) makes things really pop. And then of course there are the autumn colours.
In this post, I’m putting up some photos and videos of Queenstown and its neighbourhood in these three seasons.
First of all, the Brecon Street steps, from Shotover Street up to Man Street, in the direction of the famous Skyline Gondola.
And in the suburbs.
The neighouring community of Arrowtown is particularly famous for its autumn colours.
The next photo, taken near Arrowtown, shows a dog leaping in the stubble of the fields. (It might have been taken in winter, but it looks autumnal.)
In fact, they have an autumn festival in Arrowtown.
(I’ve got an earlier post called Amazing Arrowtown, in which the videos just above and the dog photo first appeared, along with much else. Check it out!)
And so on to winter snows. The following photo shows a heavy dump on Cecil and Walter Peaks, on the south side of Lake Wakatipu, in June.
The next photo shows what I mean about things popping in the low sun!
In the following photo, taken up at the Skyline, you can see the winter sun glinting off the window of one of the gondolas, and the lake far below.
Gondola fares start from NZ $69 for a single trip for adults, though Otago and Southland residents can get a Gondola Annual Pass for just NZ $139 per person (adult) or NZ $89 for children and seniors. There’s also a luge at the top (for which you pay extra), as well as restaurants and cafés, and several hiking trails begin there as well (see my recent post Hiking Bowen Peak with the Wakatipu Walkers).
Even when it is winter, the sun often burns the snow off north-facing slopes, as you can see in the next photo of Cecil and Walter Peaks, actually taken later into winter than the last one.
And here’s the usual scrum near Ferg Burger.
The next photo shows rays of golden sun on the hillside above the Arawata Track, which runs for part of its way beneath the power lines that you can also see in the photo.
Here’s the view out of the window of a jet airliner, descending into Queenstown over the Pisa Range and the Snow Farm Nordic Skiing Area, which I talk about in a couple of posts here and here.
And here’s a photo of the Lake Wakatipu waterfront at Queenstown, on a sunny winter’s day.
The next photograph shows an amazing full rainbow, intensely bright at the bottom left, with a ghostly inverted rainbow visible just outside it.
And the next photo shows Coronet Peak, one of the two skifields that are closest to Queenstown, by night.
It appeared first in a post of mine called ‘Changing Times at Coronet Peak.’ The next photo was taken at Coronet Peak, with its army of snowmaking machines in the background. The lowest skifield in New Zealand, Coronet Peak often needs to turn on the snowmakers.
The following panorama appears in another post called ‘A Misty Day out at the Remarkables: Matchstalk Figures Amidst the Snow.’ The Remarkables Ski Area is the other skifield that is really close to Queenstown.
With the coming of spring, the skifields are still going strong, but the cherry blossoms are coming out. The next photo was taken in Christchurch, but there are lots of flowering cherries in Queenstown as well.
The last picture in this post was taken just today. It shows logs washed up on Queenstown’s lakeshore beach after an end-of-winter storm that caused a huge slip down One Mile Creek, carrying masses of trees onto the One Mile Roundabout and into Lake Wakatipu: a really incredible event, but the kind of thing that is becoming more common with climate change.
Finally, I must give thanks to a friend of mine named Chris, who supplied most of these photos and the gondola video.
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