All of us woke in the small hours of the night on Day 26. A powerful wind was roaring through Burkes Pass, and we could hear the outdoor furniture being tossed around. By morning, the sun was shining, and it was time for us to get ready to leave for our next destination. We needed to reach Christchurch by the end of the day, where we would be spending the next three nights. Along the way, we planned to stop to hike up Mount Sunday. It’s a beautiful area in its own right, but it’s also the place in the Lord of the Rings where the scenes of Edoras were filmed.

We turned off the main road, the access road grew progressively smaller and rougher, from paved to barely paved to dirt to gravel. We had to ford one small stream. And as we approached Mount Sunday, the wind once again began to pick up strength.

Eventually, we reached the trailhead. We parked the car and set off. We were already excited to see the distinctive shape of Mount Sunday, which is the smaller mountain in the picture below.

The CGI fortress from the movies was missing of course, but the location still looked somehow martial and lordly. The small mountain was an ideal spot for the hall of the horse lords.

Excited by what we were already seeing, we continued our hike.

We soon reached a large stream, where salmon spawn. Water and fish within sight of the mountain? See?! Perfect spot to build a fortress.

Like many of the trails we’ve hiked in New Zealand, this one was crossed with a bridge, though this is the first bridge we’ve found that caps the number of people crossing at one.

Perhaps the neatest part of visiting Edoras in person was to get a sense of the scale of the place. Mount Sunday is much bigger than it seems in the LOTR movies. Indeed, it’s much bigger than it looks in these photos. For scale, the picture below shows Julie on the left side of the photo beginning to hike her way up.

And the picture below, which was taken only part of the way up the mountain, shows Lydie and Cassie trying to catch up in the center-lower-left.

(Just for the nerds: I guess Edoras was much more defensible than the movies suggest. Gandalf was right that Theodin should have fought rather than running off to helms deep.)

Up on top of the mountain the views were amazing.

Mount Sunday is a smaller mountain nestled in a river valley between much bigger mountains. The pictures don’t capture how high we are or how windy it was. Lydie took a quick video that conveys it better.

As Lydie said in the video, we had to do some scene recreation.

After thoroughly enjoying ourselves, both because of the amazing natural beauty and the LOTR connections, we hiked back down and back to the car. It was an incredible hike— a beautiful day, an amazing location, and some great LOTR tomfoolery.

Back in the car, we drove another 2.5 hours to reach Christchurch. We arrived after dark and hit the grocery store. Well fed, we settled into our new place, where we would spend the next 3 nights. We ended the night by watching The Hobbit. Another unforgettable day!

-Will