Prelude to Aspiring: Or, what to do when there's no snow in paradise

Finding not much snow up the skifields this winter, I go on a trip to the Matukituki Valley. This is a hidden gem below Mt Aspiring, up a 50 km road westward from Wanaka. It was the site of a famous 1949 expedition in which the elderly explorer and founder of the New Zealand Alpine Club, A. P. Harper, was accompanied by the poet James K. Baxter, the composer Douglas Lilburn and the photographer Brian Brake in the hope of making a great artistic production, which unfortunately never happened.