Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 6 (October 1, 1929)

Lake Wakatipu — A Fifty-Mile Serpentine and its Alpine Walls

page 38

Lake Wakatipu
A Fifty-Mile Serpentine and its Alpine Walls

“Lake Wakatipu I regard as in the front rank of tourist attractions of the world. One might spend a year in that locality and then not exhaust its glories. Queenstown (on the lakeside) is one of the prettiest spots on earth …” said a well-known European traveller before leaving the Dominion some time ago. Lake Wakatipu is reached by rail either from Dunedin or Invercargill. In the following article, specially written for the N.Z. Railways Magazine, Mr. James Cowan gives some impressions of the world-famed lake and the rugged grandeur of its setting.

When first I sailed along the South Arm of Lake Wakatipu from the rail-head at Kingston and gazed up at the tors and spikes and sword-blades of the strangely weathered mountains that precipitously parapeted its dark blue depths, I thought it was more like some sea-fiord than a far inland lake. Everything was built on such a scale that it seemed a part of a savagely bold sea coast. The waters in that sound, where a lead-line would go down a thousand feet or so, were of an uncanny stillness; not a ripple broke the surface until our steamer's bow cut through the unsunned floor and set it quivering in long undulations.

The late afternoon sun set the ancient cragtops glowing like incandescent rocks; down in the watery canyons, not more than a mile wide in places, it was as if one were in a deep river gorge into which the direct sunshine fell only at midday. It was very grand mountain architecture, and the play of colour on the summits was a picture of glory; but it was a relief to pass out from the narrows and see before us a wider vista of the lake, with the middle arm spreading away to the elbow on the west and north.

“We'll pe there in a ferry few minutes what-effer,” said my old Highland sheep-farmer acquaintance, who had a station, he told me, on the shore of the lake. Then I saw the sunlit white houses and soft-green plantations of Queenstown, as pretty a little town as one could find in the length of New Zealand—all the prettier for its contrast to the rather grim landscapes that hemmed it in.

From Ben Lomond Top.

That was a first impression of deep dark Wakatipu. I saw it from a very different viewpoint a few days later. Three of us climbed (on horseback) Ben Lomond; we started from our Queenstown hotel before dawn, and we watched the morning magnificence of the sun breaking through the sea of mist that lay around us—we were literally above the clouds there—and looked around at the darker sea of mountain tops, incredibly broken, shattered as if by ages of earthquake play, that stretched away for leagues upon leagues to north and east. It was from there that we saw the lake as a mountain kea might see it in his flight, or as an aviator might see it from his flying plane. It suggested at once some enormous snake of blue lying lazily watchful, coiling its slow length among the mountains. It appeared from this high look-out place a lighter blue than it was five thousand feet below. It lay as quiet as could be; the morning breezes had not set in, and we saw the currents and flows that slightly darkened its surface like little rivers of blue oil.

A Mighty Digger.

That was the fancy that the general contour of Wakatipu suggested, a water-reptile, perhaps, half uncoiled, in its bed amid the bare and aged mountains. Recollections came too, of the Norse nature-myth about the vast serpent that encircled the world. But there is no need to go to Old World mythology for imaginative folk-talk about such places as this. There is an ancient story of the Maoris, given me by old legend tellers of the Ngai-Tahu tribe at Moeraki and Puketiraki. They said that these great lakes of the South Island were magically formed by their remote ancestor Rakaihaitu, who was the chief of the canoe Uruao, which came to these shores from the South Sea Islands very long ago, probably a thousand years, as nearly as could be reckoned from the whakapapa or genealogical list. The sailor rangatira travelled through the page 39 raw new country, which he thought would be improved by the creation of some lakes. So with his ko or digging implement, fortified with enchantments, he excavated the beds of many of our lakes, which immediately filled with water and gratified his sense of the fitness of things. He began in the North by scooping out Rotoroa and Rotoiti, the South Nelson lakes which form the chief sources of the Buller River. Then he worked southward, and his final achievement was digging out the bed of Wakatipu.

It is a fine poetic fancy, this fairy tale of Rakaihaitu.
The Picturesque Rail Approach To Lake Wakatipu. The rail terminus at Kingston (1,023 feet above sea level) at the southern end of Lake Wakatipu, South Island.

The Picturesque Rail Approach To Lake Wakatipu.
The rail terminus at Kingston (1,023 feet above sea level) at the southern end of Lake Wakatipu, South Island.

We may take it that this explorer of old was something of a geologist in his Maori-Polynesian way, and had more than a glimmering of scientific fact, the glacial origin, in part at any rate, of these southern lakes, Wakatipu in particular, is so obviously trenched out by that slow but most powerful of agencies, the rock-grinding ice mass.

An Amazing Deep.

Fifty miles in length, with a mean breadth of two and one-third miles, and extreme depth of 1,242 feet (as revealed by Mr. Keith Lucas's bathymetrical survey in 1902), Wakatipu is the most markedly glacier-made lake of all our New Zealand freshwater sheets. It is, too, a collecting tank for many snow-fed rivers, some of which, again, have their sources in beautiful alpine tarns. Its outlet is that famous gold-bearing river the Kawarau.

“Come and lift your fortunes now,
Dam the roaring Kawarau.”

More than sixty years ago the scene of frenzied diggers’ activity, and now of the most modern scientific efforts for the salving of hidden gold. It is rather marvellous to think of the depth of this huge water-trough among the mountains. The bottom of the lake, where the floor is almost level, in the south arm near the base of the Bay Peaks and extending thence to the bend of the lake just opposite Queenstown, is more than two hundred feet below ocean level.

Shark's Teeth Peaks.

Fantastic as well as grim is the face of some of these mighty mountain walls. Never can one forget the sunset glow on the Cecil Peaks, the Bayonet Peaks; Mt. Walter. But the picture to remember above all others is that of those shark's teeth peaks that serrate the grand front of the Remarkables. Carved sharply against the sky this quite monstrous sierra rises from one dizzy pinnacle to another until it culminates in the Double Cone, twin crags of saw-edged rock very nearly 7,900 feet high—6,900 feet above the lake. page 40 It is a vast jumble of sharp ridges and avalanche-race tracks, those deeply-cut couloirs that winter fills with deep drifts of snow. Kopuwai, the Maoris called this strangely carved range, and there is a dim old legend about a fearful ogre that lived in a cave, one of whose mighty deeds was drinking dry one day—it must have been a mighty hot summer—the swift-flowing Kawarau and the Matau—the Clutha, which it feeds. Kopuwai would be an extremely welcome demon to-day from the gold-winning point of view.

“From such a scene, how many feelings spring! How many thoughts flash through the kindling mind!“—Robert Patterson. Sailing up Lake Wakatipu in the Railway Department's steamer “Earnslaw.”

“From such a scene, how many feelings spring! How many thoughts flash through the kindling mind!“—Robert Patterson.
Sailing up Lake Wakatipu in the Railway Department's steamer “Earnslaw.”

The Picture Town.

Queenstown is a pleasant place, its old-fashioned air, its suggestion of pioneering history which is not overlaid entirely by modern innovations. It is a town of garden charms and tree solace. The lure of gold brought the blue-shirted diggers up this way just on seventy years ago, and many a place name about the lake is a relic of those days of wash-dish and sluice. Five-mile Creek, Lake Dispute, Skipper's, Shotover, and a score of other names hold stories of endeavour, romance, success and tragedy that would make a book. Queenstown Park is quite a fascinating place, and Queenstown Bay, viewed from here, is a dream of a picture on fine calm evenings, with the white village and green woods and soft blue mountains mirrored in its glimmering smoothness.

The Immemorial Rocks.

There, in the park, one has an unexpected reminder of Antarctic adventure, the great boulder with its inscription to the heroic Captain Scott. The slopes are strewn with such great rocks, now half-covered with trailing climbing vegetation. They are ancient beyond reckoning, the moraine rocks of the glacier that once came snaking down where the blue water now fills Wakatipu's winding trench. I remember once an old Irish farmer friend of mine in the North discussing such rocky finger-posts to the past when we were talking over experiences at the base of the Southern Alps. Just such ice-striated boulders, smooth-backed roches moutonnees as are seen in abundance on these lowlands far from any present glacier, he had seen in his native mountains of Wicklow, the reminder of a remote glacial age. “When I was a small boy,” he said, “I asked my father what made those curious markings like deep scratches, on the rocks. His reply was, ‘Those marks, my lad, were made by the teeth of God's harrows.’”

It was an even more poetic concept, that Irish countryman's fancy, than the Maori legend of Rakaihaitu and his mighty ko, the ice-plough of the Alps.

page 41

The Morning Light.

Queenstown is passing cold in winter, but those freezing nights are compensated for by the exceeding glory of the days in a spell of quiet and calm over mountain and lake. It is worth getting up, even in winter, to see the jagged shadows of the eastern mountains projected in sharp outline on the steeply slanting mountains opposite, and to watch the dark adumbrations on the grey precipices chased
“Where heavenly pensive contemplation dwells.“—Pope. Reflections in Lake Wakatipu—Queenstown's beautiful park and the “Remarkables.”

“Where heavenly pensive contemplation dwells.“—Pope.
Reflections in Lake Wakatipu—Queenstown's beautiful park and the “Remarkables.”

lower and lower by the dawn, until the sun leaps flowing over the range top and the silent lake flashes into life.

To the Lake-Head.

Grander still are the pictures at the head of the lake. You go up there by the excellent Government steamer, run by the Railway Department, which brought you from the head of the rails at Kingston. It is a smooth voyage of about twenty-eight miles, and every mile is a new picture of wonder. Rock castles are all around, the range pinnacles that sometimes seem huge ruined medieval fortresses set on the mountain's brow. The left side, as you go up the lake, presents the most enchanting effects of colour. In the morning the deeper corries and glens are veiled in purple haze, and slowly-lifting mists; waterfalls streak the dark grey and blue ranges, glinting in the sunlight, cascading out of the mountain beechwoods; rosy clouds float across the crag heads; shadows and high lights alternate along the deeply-scored hill faces. Over yonder is sheep country, in spite of its formidable contour, and my old Highland wool-man of the steamer has his homestead and shearing sheds somewhere in yonder.

The Vanished Canoe-Men.

There are three low green islands in this northern arm of the lake. About the largest, which the Wakatipu people call Pigeon Island, I got a place-name to a story many years ago from a Maori veteran of the gold-diggings, Henare te Maire, of the Waihao Country, South Canterbury, who was hunting for treasure in the famous Shotover away back in 1862. Wawahi-waka—“splitting canoes”—he said was its name. To this little island the Ngati-Mamoe and other tribes resorted in the stone age to fell and split trees for the purpose of making canoes. Totara pines of large size grew on these isles—now covered with koromiko and other shrubs—before they were overrun by fire. Greenstone axes and ornaments of the vanished Maori have been found on Wawahi-waka.

page 42

The Way to Paradise.

Kinloch and Glenorchy, the townships at the lake head are the starting places for many very wonderful alpine expeditions. Grandest of all the peaks in the Wakatipu country is Mt. Earnslaw, and here, at Glenorchy, one is reminded that that climbing pioneer, the Rev. W. G. Green, with his two Swiss guides and two other companions, set out for the ascent of the eastern arete of Earnslaw in 1882. But few people want to tackle such a giant of the icy Alps. Most of us are content with easier jaunts, and of course everyone wants to see Paradise. That elysian spot is more readily reached than the stranger would imagine, it is only ten miles or so away.

Beech woods, hung with swaying moss like some fairy forest; lakes that are heaven's looking glasses, peeps of far away snows and glaciers, here and there a farm in strangely romantic setting; snow-fed streams and mountain brooks, and then you are at Paradise. On a day of summer glory you will not wonder at its celestial name. In reality the name origin is not quite so poetic.
“Heavened in the hush of purple hills.“—Gerald Massey. Beautiful Queenstown on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, South Island, New Zealand.

“Heavened in the hush of purple hills.“—Gerald Massey.
Beautiful Queenstown on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, South Island, New Zealand.

The old-time diggers so christened the place because when they first ventured up there it was alive with paradise duck, the putangitangi of the Maoris—and very good eating they were, the greatest delicacy of every gold fossicker's camp.

The Rees Valley and the Lennox Falls make another expedition of unusual charm—a river of utter peace—except in the time of floods—a tussock plain shut in by long shouldering slants of ranges. Earnslaw's shining glaciers, and grand old forests hanging on its mountain side. And waterfalls—they are so many in this land of streams that a cascade has to be of a beauty almost indescribable in words to be singled out for mention over the others. Mere photographs are inadequate for the proper picturing of this country; even an artist's brush is not altogether satisfying. You want colour photography perhaps, but with the motions added; a cinema that will faithfully reproduce the richness and depth of the colour that eludes even the cleverest painter.