Helicopter Hill and Fresh Trout

So my brother in law is a bit of a fisherman. Like, probably more of an expert on fishing than I am on hot chocolate, and that’s an accomplishment. He was kinda bummed that he hadn’t caught one in New Zealand. The extremely awesome DOC worker at Arthur’s Pass had told him about a fishing spot on Lake Grasmere, so Olivia and I dropped him off in the morning and then went back to our campground and took off for Helicopter Hill. On foot, though–flying is not necessary to get there.

The hike was mostly through trees, but the view at the top was lovely. In the grassy crown, we reenacted the opening scene from the Sound of Music. I’d post it here, but videos just take so long to load and I’d hate to use up all the data. Rest assured that my boyfriend says it’s pretty much impossible to differentiate it from the original. We’re thinking about starting our own theater company that does Broadway musicals on top of mountains. But only the ones that we did in high school, because as members of the orchestra, we got to memorize all the songs, and why would we waste that knowledge? Reminiscing about how awesome our classes were at theater, we came back down the mountain and returned to Lake Grasmere.
We couldn’t find Trevor, but a nice local man who was fishing pointed us towards him. He was laying in the sun at the edge of the lake, the net he had labored over now dismantled so that he could use the string to keep the fish on it.

It was right after he cleaned it that we realized we really had no way of cooking it. We drove 40 minutes back to Arthur’s Pass and found that, though the store sold tin foil, it was out of stock. The pizza place next door gave us some. Trevor chopped up an onion and cooked it on our camp stove, the tail hanging over the edge. (We didn’t eat that part.) It was delicious. Way to go, Trevor!!