Rees-Dart Valley

Where it sits. Glenorchy stands at the head of Lake Wakatipu, forty-six kilometres from Queenstown by a road that clings to the lake's western shore for most of its length and delivers one of the more theatrical drives in the country. The settlement is small — a few hundred permanent residents — and occupies flat delta ground where the Rees and Dart rivers empty into the lake through a maze of willow, lagoon and grey shingle. The Richardson Mountains rise abruptly to the east, the Humboldt and Ailsa Mountains close the horizon north and west. At the wharf you are barely above lake level; a few kilometres away the ground is at two thousand metres. That vertical compression is exactly why the place photographs the way it does.

How it came to be here. Runholders reached the head of the lake in the early 1860s, and for the following century the water was the highway rather than the road. Steamers carried wool, stock, mail and passengers up from Queenstown; the TSS Earnslaw, launched in 1912 and still coal-fired on the lake today, worked this run for decades before tourism became her trade. Scheelite — the ore of tungsten — was mined in small, punishing workings high in the Richardson Mountains from the 1880s until the last operations closed in the twentieth century, and old pack tracks still thread the faces above town. The red-painted corrugated-iron wharf shed on the foreshore is a survivor of the lake-freight era and is now the single most photographed structure for a hundred kilometres. The road connection to Queenstown came late and was not fully sealed until the 1990s, which is much of the reason Glenorchy still reads as the end of something rather than a Queenstown suburb.

On screen. Glenorchy is the practical base for the densest cluster of Middle-earth locations anywhere in the South Island, and most of them are within half an hour of its one intersection. The production used the area heavily across both trilogies because the beech forest, the braided rivers and the glaciated valley walls sit side by side with no modern intrusion in frame.

• Paradise and the lower Dart Valley, twenty minutes up the unsealed road, stood in for the forests of Lothlórien and for the country around Isengard.
• Twelve Mile Delta, passed on the drive in from Queenstown, was Ithilien — the camp where Sam cooks rabbit and the hobbits watch the Haradrim column march past.
• The Dart and Rees valleys behind the town supplied Misty Mountains material, and in the Hobbit films the wilder river country of Wilderland.
• Beorn's house was built as a standing set on the Paradise flats for The Desolation of Smaug, then removed.
• Deer Park Heights, above Queenstown on the Kelvin Peninsula, doubled for the Rohan refugee road and the warg attack.

What you actually see today. A general store, a hotel whose licence long predates the road, a handful of guiding outfits and a public toilet block that gets more camera traffic than most cathedrals. The Glenorchy Walkway loops for about an hour around the lagoon on a boardwalk, past drowned willow and the occasional crested grebe, with the Humboldts reflected on any still morning. Jetboats run up the Dart; kayaks work the lagoon; horses go out onto the flats. Glenorchy is also the trailhead town for three major tramps — the Routeburn, the Rees-Dart and the Greenstone-Caples — with the Routeburn Shelter another twenty-five kilometres up a gravel road. Fuel here is the last before the mountains, and prices reflect it. The village has deliberately resisted growth: there is no supermarket, the school roll is measured in dozens, and the nearest hospital is in Queenstown.

The wharf, and why the light works. The foreshore is worth ten quiet minutes. The wharf reaches out over shallow water that goes from clear to opaque grey depending on what the Dart has been doing upstream, and the shed sits low against the Humboldt Mountains, which run roughly north-south and therefore catch full side-light morning and evening. In winter the head of the lake often sits under a cold inversion while the tops stay in sun, which produces the layered, smoking-valley effect that turns up in a great deal of the region's photography. Frost here is severe by New Zealand standards, and the lake edge can rime.

Getting there and timing. The Queenstown-Glenorchy Road takes about forty-five minutes and is sealed, narrow in places, and lined with lay-bys that exist because people stop anyway. Bennetts Bluff is the best of them. Beyond Glenorchy the roads to Paradise and to the Routeburn are unsealed, with fords that rise quickly in rain. Summer brings sandflies to the lake edge and long evening light that holds past nine o'clock. Autumn, roughly late April into May, gives the calmest water and the strongest colour from introduced poplars and larch. Winter is cold, clear and quiet, with snow to the lake shore in a hard year and a genuine risk of ice on the road in the shaded corners south of Bennetts Bluff. Accommodation in the village is limited and books out in peak season; many visitors stay in Queenstown and drive.