Mount Aspiring National Park

Where it sits. Mount Aspiring National Park runs for about a hundred kilometres along the main divide of the Southern Alps, from the Haast River in the north to the Humboldt Mountains above Lake Wakatipu in the south. It covers roughly 3,500 square kilometres, which makes it New Zealand's third largest national park, and it straddles the boundary between Otago and the West Coast. Gazetted in 1964, it was enlarged several times and in 1990 was incorporated with Fiordland, Westland Tai Poutini and Aoraki/Mount Cook into Te Wāhipounamu, the South West New Zealand World Heritage Area. Its centrepiece is Mount Aspiring itself — Tititea in Māori, often translated as glistening peak — a sharp glaciated horn of 3,033 metres that is the highest mountain in the country outside the Aoraki/Mount Cook region, and the only three-thousander in New Zealand with a genuinely pyramidal profile.

Ice, and what it left behind. Almost everything here was shaped by glaciers, and a good deal of it still is. The park holds well over a hundred glaciers, including the Bonar, Volta and Dart, and the great U-shaped troughs of the Matukituki, Wilkin, Young, Rees and Dart valleys are their work. The rock is largely schist in the south and greywacke further north, and the divide is a hard weather boundary: the western side takes many metres of rain a year off the Tasman Sea while the eastern valleys are markedly drier and colder. Beech forest covers the valley floors and lower faces to a sharp treeline, above which the ground goes to snow tussock, alpine herbfields and then bare rock. The park is a stronghold for kea, the alpine parrot, and for rock wren; blue duck hold in the faster rivers; and Haast tokoeka kiwi survive in the far north of the park.

On screen. The park's mountains carry an enormous amount of Middle-earth's visual weight without ever being a single named location. Aerial units flew the divide repeatedly to gather plates for the Misty Mountains, and the ridgelines, glacier heads and snowfields that appear behind Caradhras and in the long travelling sequences of both trilogies were largely gathered along this stretch of the Alps. On the ground, the valleys at the park's southern boundary did the specific work: the Dart and Rees, reached from Glenorchy and Paradise, provided the beech forest used for Lothlórien and the terraces used for the country around Isengard, and their braided riverbeds appear repeatedly as Wilderland. The park's own interior — the Matukituki, the Wilkin, the Cascade Saddle — is largely too remote for a film unit to work in without helicopters, which is precisely why it still looks the way it does.

What you actually see today. For most visitors the park is met at three points. Raspberry Creek at the head of the West Matukituki Valley, an hour's unsealed drive from Wanaka with several fords, is the trailhead for the Rob Roy Glacier Track — three to four hours return through beech to a hanging glacier and a wall of waterfalls, and by far the most accessible serious alpine scenery in the region. The Blue Pools, on State Highway 6 near Makarora, is a short boardwalk to a swing bridge over startlingly clear water in the Makarora River. And in the south, the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealand's Great Walks, crosses the park from the Glenorchy side over Harris Saddle before dropping into Fiordland. Beyond those, the Rees-Dart circuit takes four to five days, and Cascade Saddle — the traverse between the Matukituki and the Dart — is a demanding and genuinely hazardous route on which people have died.

Getting there and timing. Wanaka is the northern gateway, Glenorchy and Queenstown the southern one, and State Highway 6 over Haast Pass, pushed through in the 1960s, is the only road crossing. There is no road into the park's interior. December to March is the practical tramping season; snow lies on the passes into November and returns in April, and the Department of Conservation's avalanche advisories apply into spring. Rivers here are unbridged on many routes and rise dramatically within hours of rain on the divide, so trip plans need spare days built into them. Huts are booked in advance for the Great Walks and are first-come on other routes. Sandflies are constant below the treeline. Fuel, food and permits should all be sorted in Wanaka, Makarora or Glenorchy, because there is nothing beyond them.