It rained on the west coast

So let me set the scene. This was in between Franz Josef (the town) and the walking track to Sentinel Rock where we saw the glacier face. As you can see, it was raining a little.

The next day, on the way out of Haast, we could see it was an unusual amount of rain. A nice little land slip across the road to cross carefully in our Toyota Platz was interesting.

Then a second landslip.

A bit of water across the road.

We could tell it was raining more than usual near "The Gates of Haast"....

But the final thing that made me think about the weather was when we had to cross this:

This was between Haast Pass and Taras. The nice enormous vehicle with a giant brush swept a lot of mud and debris away and told us it would be fine now. It was still interesting to drive across.... We had another one later to cross as well but was nowhere near this size.

The next morning reading the newspaper in Twizel, apparently the river (Pepin creek?) burst its banks at around 11:30am, and State Highway 6 was closed at midday. We were quite lucky. Also looks like now the rain kept going up the coast and people have been evacuated from Greymouth, where we went through only a few days earlier.