Part Two: Hoar Frost Days

On Sunday 21 we managed to drive into town without too much difficulty, primarily to get groceries but also to enjoy a cafe coffee, and simply to get out of the house! It was sunny and bright with a deep blue sky, and all was very picturesque, with many photo opportunities. I would call it a 'winter wonderland', except that I have a strong and possibly unreasonable aversion to that particular cliche?!

Photographs from this day on the previous five pages.

That night it got really cold: as we sat inside, only just managing to keep the main living room warm enough, we watched in something approaching disbelief as the temperature dropped further and further: -8, -9, -10, -12, -14, and finally an unprecedented -16 degrees when we took ourselves to bed.

On Tuesday morning, I got up to have a shower. It was very cold, but my need was great! I'd just got under the lovely warm water when it suddenly became unlovely super-hot water, and the penny dropped: cold water had frozen in the pipes, now in the bathroom as well as the kitchen. So it turned into one of the shortest showers in history, as I beat a hasty exit from the shower box and bathroom.

Then, once dressed and in the living room—where we
have an indoor-outdoor thermometer--I discovered why the pipes had frozen: outside it was -17.5, and indoors it was only 3.2 degrees! That was when the Pukaki temperature had recorded -22. This was reported as being colder than the top of Mount Everest—presumably as it is now; not when it's midwinter in Nepal.

That morning, and for several following, there was ice on the inside of the windows (especially, though not only, the bedrooms—this in a house that is double-glazed, and with insulation in floor, walls, and ceiling! The high that day was -6, and now all piped water was frozen, including the water in the toilet bowl. (Hot water wasn’t frozen of course, but because the cold was, we had to stop using it as cold water couldn't flow into the hot water to replace what had been used).

Wednesday 24 June was -12 when we got up. After breakfast we got a few things together and headed off to Timaru. It was good to

Map: Twizel to Timaru, Wednesday 24 June
Pins show Twizel, Tekapo, Fairlie, Pleasant Point, Timaru

have Margaret's car, as being 4WD it's a little safer on icy roads, particularly for a long journey. A slow trip, of course, but very picturesque. I took about 60 photos on the way. We'd been without Internet for a day or two, but once at Jen's I was able to upload the best 7 onto Facebook, and was delighted to get about 200 “Likes” over the next couple of days. I'd posted to two groups: my own personal one and a special 'closed' Twizel-only page (though it includes people all over the country with Twizel affiliations). We

stayed away only one night, but a warm house with fibre optic Internet (and, for that matter, a sunny and comparatively warm outdoors) was wonderful. Oh, and a long shower!

Photos:
Below: trees covered in hoar frost just beg to be photographed
Next page sometimes we were in fog, then we came out into clear skies
Over: Lake Pukaki; more trees by the road

Thursday 25: the trip back in the afternoon was less cold than the day before (though it still dropped to -10 on the way home), and the roads were ice-free practically all the way. When we got back home at about 4.15 pm, I spent a very hot 3?4 hour shovelling the days-old snow from in front of my car, and getting it off the roof and

windscreen, so that I could use it again.

The house, which had been empty and unheated for a day and a half, had obviously been seriously cold inside. The 5 cm of water left in the sink after doing the dishes on Wednesday morning had frozen into a solid block, as had the bottle of water that I keep in the living room, and the bucket of water kept in the bathroom for toilet-flushing purposes was well on the way to being one solid block too.

Water in the toilet now had to have hot water on it to thaw it out, and after that for two or three we kept a good quantity of salt in the water to stop it freezing again. Indoor plants had died (though some were resurrected! and in Margaret's herb garden outside the parsley sported large amounts of hoar frost.

Photos: previous page
top: trip back home from Timaru: the stretch between Twizel and HCS, frost on the tree branches now melted
bottom left: inside the house was literally icy when we got back. Sub-zero shiraz just isn't the same!
bottom right: Margaret's herb garden had suffered. This is the parsley.

This page:
above, left: icicles and hoar frost by the back door
above, right: my bike, closer up. That's frost, not snow

Friday 26 June: The morning dawned bright, and after having breakfast and de-icing the windscreen, I drove myself into town for the first time in over a week. The snow was now hard enough to walk on without sinking, which made it much easier to get around, especially on foot. I spent a couple of hours in the morning on behalf of the Community Centre, ringing (and in some cases visiting) known elderly people in the town, making sure that they were warm and dry and had everything they wanted.

On the way home, (where it was safe to do so!), I deliberately braked suddenly to encourage the big block of snow on the car roof to slide forward over the windscreen. It was much less dangerous to clean it off the windscreen and bonnet (by hand) than to have it slide off on the main highway, obscuring vision completely. Unfortunately it snapped my radio aerial clean off as it was sliding forward!

Saturday 27 June: Sunny and clear again. This stage of snowmelt now had an unfortunate effect: as the sun melts the top bit of snow, overnight it freezes again, turning it to solid ice. As one might imagine, this makes walking much trickier, though when driving, moving from stationery is easier than through snow, so long as you keep the revs low so that the wheels don't spin.

And that's it—the ten-day Twizel cold spell! It probably won't happen like this again for a long time, though of course it's always possible. Next: some of the privations we had to put up with...