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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 6, Issue 4 (September 1, 1931.)

[section]

Where The Waiho River Issues. The foot of Franz Josef Glacier.

Where The Waiho River Issues.
The foot of Franz Josef Glacier
.

When it rains in South Westland it does rain! But a rainy day in this land of rivers, forests, and glaciers, is a very different thing from a wet day in Wellington or Auckland. It is an experience that more than compensates for any slight upsetting of itineraries, and if you are anywhere near Franz Josef Glacier, and lucky enough to see the Waiho in flood, then you are being treated gratis to a spectacle money couldn't buy. (The photographs accompanying this article were taken by the writer.)

In Sydney, the other day, they had twelve inches of rain in forty-eight hours, and on the other side of the world, people were dying like flies in a heat wave. In March last, Auckland was under the spell of drought; patient gardeners stood to the very last minute of the very last half-hour of daylight-saving hosing their perishing gardens, while down in Westland the rain gauge recorded ten inches inside twenty-four hours, and we guests at Franz Josef Glacier Hotel were marching in bathing suits and oilskins down to the Waiho River, through pouring rain, to see the flood.

It was well worth seeing—those one-day trippers, held up by road slips and flood, were luckier than they knew. Any day one may cross the Waiho Bridge and see nothing but a shingle riverbed and a few swift streamlets threading their way between the bush-clad banks; seldom has the visitor the good fortune to watch the swift rise of one of the swiftest and most dangerous of all those beautiful, menacing rivers of South Westland. All night the rain had come down in torrents; all next morning we watched the steady, pitiless downpour from the windows of the hotel, watched the white mist-clouds come sweeping down over the Mummy Hill, over Canavan's Knob and lofty, snow-capped McFettrick. The mists cleared, then swept down again, and soon the river mists came sweeping up from the Waiho River bed to meet them.

When the Waiho is low, the river bed is nearly a mile wide, and sheep are driven up it to the Main South Road from grazing country down by the ocean. Its low banks are fringed with tawny tussock and plumy toi grass; starry wild flowers and page 38 beautiful berries grow close to the moss clumps between the patches of shingle, and the children love to paddle in the little streams that go meandering far and wide from the main channel of the river.