The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 6, Issue 3 (August 1, 1931)
Pukaki's Land-and-Water-scapes
Pukaki's Land-and-Water-scapes.
You skirt the shores of Lake Takapo and Lake Pukaki on your way through the Mackenzie Country—a storyland of the sheep-raising days—to the wonderful valley where the Hermitage sits under the shoulder of a tussocky mountain. Pukaki is a kind of settling-tank on the grand scale. It receives the many-streamed Tasman River, bearing the washdown of the central part of the Aorangi glacial system, and its upper part is gradually being filled up with the gravelly silt of the mountains. From its lower end rushes the strong Waitaki River, clear, clean and blue. The lake bed receives all the debris borne down from the Alps. Pukaki means a river source, the waterhead; so the name is literally descriptive.
The lake has no beauty in itself, but it is a perfect mirror at certain times of the day and in the right weather, for the alpine glories at its head.
In the old days of coaching to the Hermitage we used to stay a night at the Pukaki Hotel, and never have I seen greater glory of crystal morning light and projection of mountain splendour on glassy water than that early vision from the Pukaki bridge crossing the blue river just where it issues from the lake.
And should you chance to be at the lake-foot in the evening, just after sunset, you will have a scene enchanting in its tender wealth of colour and its air of dreamy restfulness. The purple forms of the encircling ranges and the exquisite blue that dyes the distant alpine shoulders and the foothills are thrown far across the glimmerglass of Pukaki. High and beyond, the ice-peaks and sierras gleam in cloudlike pinnacles, all tinged a warm and rosy hue by the afterglow; a vision celestial.