Hooker Lake Walk

All around you are the landscape features that result from rapid mountain uplift along with erosion by fast moving glaciers, rivers and gale force winds. The Alpine Fault reaches the ground surface only 23 kms to the northwest and slopes deep under these mountains at an angle. Another active fault (the Murchison Fault) passes close by the end of the Hooker Lake. This means that major earthquakes have affected these mountains over the last several million years, with uplift and erosion gradually changing the topography completely over time.
The glaciers are in rapid retreat at present. The Hooker Lake, like all the other valley glacier terminal lakes in the Southern Alps, is very new as it only started to form in the 1970s. Once the lake was established, the ice has been eroded more quickly by the undercutting effect of the water in an accelerating process, and the expanding lake is now well over 2 kms in length.
Extreme weather conditions and precipitation levels that are very high on a global scale (roughly 10m to 12m water equivalent per year on the Main Divide), create very dynamic erosion with fast moving glaciers, and frequent ice avalanches and rockfalls on the surrounding slopes.
Glacial retreat over the last 150 years has left bare moraine walls on the sides of the glacier valleys. As the buttressing effect of the ice is removed, the slopes are further destabilised and eroded.

As you enjoy your walk to the lake, look out for all the classic erosion features that you may have learnt about at school such as U and V shaped valleys, glaciers, ice cliffs, terminal and lateral moraines, erratic boulders, rockfall scars, and debris fans.
Try to imagine that only 150 years ago the ice was higher than the top of the now exposed moraine walls of both the Mueller and Hooker valleys, which shows how much it has retreated since then. At the peak of the last glaciation, 20 - 25,000 years ago, the ice was several hundreds of metres over your head!