Rain forest and golden hills

Once you have entered the Franz Josef area you are in a World Heritage area. The Colosseum and Grand Canyon also belong to this club, but this is a huge area, which includes the Southern Alps and Fiordland. We are in for more spectacular scenery.
We stop at the visitor center for the World Heritage Center in Haast, which is a beach town. This is more or less the end of the main road in this area. Now we climb inland thru the Haast Pass and Mt. Aspiring National Park. This area gets a lot of rainfall - some 160 inches or more a year. The cliffs and mountains along the pass are thick with trees and vegetation. As we climb the pass, there are too many braided waterfalls to count or name. All the rains have made them fuller. It's geting late in the afternoon but we keep stopping.
But after we cross the pass and start down to the 2 large lakes below we notice a sudden change in the vegetation. What was dense rainforest on the west side of the pass is now brown hills with scattered shrubs and grasses. The Southern Alps are still covered with snow.