The Wild Lupins of Lindis Pass - Part 2

In the previous blog, I lamented how I could not find any information about the Historic Red Bridge.  Fortunately a friend of mine, Dave Gibb, has far superior googling skills than I, and managed to find a snippet of information about the bridge...

The Luggate 'Grandview Bridge' is a local icon listed highly in the Queenstown Lakes District Council's Historic Register. It was opened on October 28, 1915, and has been described as "one of the most attractively proportioned steel truss road bridges in the country." It is 103.7 metres long, and features a 61 metre Baltimore through truss, another 30.5m truss and a 12.2m rolled steel joist end span.

I bow to Dave's Superior Googling!  It might be that he's a South Islander and knew more than to just google 'Red Bridge near Hawea'.  I believe he actually put in the word Luggate, which I would never have known. I guess I'm  not a true mainlander yet, but I do believe I'm getting there!

Anyway, our next stop was the Lupin field at Bridge 2360 on the Lindis Pass.  We had seen it on our way down, and we memorised the bridge, with the intention to spend an hour photographing in this field.  We arrived about ten, knowing that this was about the right time or else everything would have been in shade.  This is view that you can see from the road - you can see in the distance the amount of Lupins growing there...  Like a river of them..

We would have loved to contact the farmer, but there was no farmhouse anywhere to be seen and it's very remote, so without further ado, we climbed the gate.  No easy task with a broken ankle, believe me!  But the Lupins beckoned and how could I resist?  That corally lump of stone on the other side of the gate is a lump of salt for the cattle. I made up that word 'corally' but it seems to fit well! They should let me write the next dictionary!  I'm always making words up!

But I digress. A short walk down that lane, past the gate, and this is what greeted us.  Looking south...

And looking north...

Just a mass of colour everywhere in various shades of blues, purples, pinks and whites. It was heaen. Lupins must be pretty hardy as they had even taken hold in the middle of the river. The river was elevated though because of the rain.

Love those Willow trees, even if they are a noxious weed here in New Zealand, they still are very attractive. The Lupins quite tall as well, which made it fun to photograph.

The sun came out briefly with a touch of mottled blue sky, which was nice after all the rain.

Of course we had to do the posing shots as well. Here's Emily smelling the Lupins. Not sure if there's a scent or not, I wasn't overwhelmed by scent while we were there, so perhaps not. I was too busy using the camera anyway.

 Liz amongst the flowers with her Tripod.

And Liz found a hill to get some elevated shots. I wasn't able to get up there because of.... you guess it - the damn foot!

 Emily and I hiding in the flowers..

After taking photos for a couple of hours, it was getting hot, so I headed to the last willow tree and found this. I managed to climb up onto that stump, no mean feat with one ankle broken! Tripods come in very handy - walking sticks, climbing sticks, poking sticks!

I took nearly 1000 images in this area. A lot in a period of the two hours we were there, but most of them were macro shots on continual burst mode, of all the bees collecting pollen from the Lupins. These shots are incredible and I'm amazed at what I saw through the macro lens. But I'll save that to Part 3.

I recently downloaded Topaz Labs and am enjoying playing with the images in that program. This is one shot I love, which I then overlaid it with the original to get the slight difference.  Which one do you like best?  I prefer the top, but that's just me!

This is a tiny tiny aphid on one of the Lupins, I was actually photographing a small droplet of water, bigger than this insect, and saw this pale yellow thing, put my glasses on and then I could just see him. I took a couple of photos not expecting them to turn out, so was pleasantly surprised to get such detail on such a small insect.

Keep a lookout for the Lupin Bees blogpost, coming soon!