Kawarau Gorge

Where it sits. The Kawarau Gorge is the corridor by which Lake Wakatipu drains east toward the Clutha. The Kawarau River is the lake's only outlet, leaving at Frankton and running roughly fifty kilometres through a schist canyon to join the Clutha at Cromwell. For about half that distance the river is squeezed into a gorge with walls of grey, glinting schist rising several hundred metres, and State Highway 6 is cut along the northern side of it on a shelf that has been widened, blasted and patched for well over a century. This is the main road between Queenstown and Cromwell, and it is the only sensible route east, which means everything about the gorge — its rockfall, its bridges, its bottlenecks — has consequences for the whole district.

A gorge with a working history. Gold was the making of this valley. Dredges and sluicing claims worked the Kawarau from the 1860s, and the Kawarau Gorge Mining Centre preserves a water race, a stamper battery and a reconstructed Chinese miner's hut on the old ground. The most conspicuous engineering, though, is at the western end: the Kawarau Gorge Suspension Bridge, opened in 1880 to carry the road across the river, a slender deck slung about forty-three metres above the water on stone-anchored cables. It was bypassed by a modern bridge and would have become a footnote had A. J. Hackett not opened the world's first commercial bungy jumping operation from it in 1988. That is now a stop on almost every Queenstown itinerary, and you can stand on the viewing platform and watch for free. Further east, the Roaring Meg power station, commissioned in the 1930s, still takes water from a steep side creek and is a rare example of a small hydro scheme built into scenery rather than despite it. Above the road on the sunnier terraces lies Gibbston, the highest and coolest of Central Otago's wine subregions, where Pinot Noir has been grown commercially since the early 1980s and several cellar doors are cut directly into the schist.

On screen. The Kawarau River supplied one of the trilogy's most recognisable images: the Fellowship's boats running down the Anduin between the Argonath, the colossal stone Pillars of the Kings that mark the northern boundary of Gondor. The river footage was shot in the gorge; the statues were added digitally, scaled up to a height nothing in the actual landscape approaches, and composited into the real canyon walls. What sells the shot is that the schist is genuinely enormous, genuinely grey and genuinely fluted, so a carved figure reads as plausible rock. Other stretches of the Kawarau stood in for the wider Anduin river journey after the Fellowship leaves Lothlórien. If you drive the highway with the films in mind, the resemblance is immediate at several points between the bungy bridge and Nevis Bluff, though there is no single marked spot and the production did not build anything here.

What you actually see today. Fast green-grey water in a slot of rock, sun that reaches the river only in the middle of the day in winter, and traffic. The canyon is used hard for recreation: whitewater rafting and jetboating both run commercially on the river, and the Kawarau is one of the few rivers in the world where a rafting trip passes directly under an operating bungy platform. Nevis Bluff, a near-vertical schist face roughly a hundred metres high above the highway, is the gorge's chronic problem — loose rock comes off it, and the road is closed for scaling and controlled blasting several times a year, sometimes for hours, occasionally for days. Anyone with a flight to catch out of Queenstown should check road status before committing to the eastern route.

Gibbston, above the water. The terraces on the northern side of the gorge sit two to four hundred metres above the river and get long, dry, sunny days with sharp night-time cooling, which is why the district's Pinot Noir keeps its acidity. Gibbston is the smallest and coolest of Central Otago's wine subregions, and its harvest is usually the last in the country. Several producers have tunnelled cellars into the schist, which holds a stable temperature without refrigeration. The Gibbston River Trail, a cycle and walking path, drops from the vineyards to the old suspension bridge and follows the river bank, and is the best way to see the gorge at walking pace rather than through a windscreen.

Getting there and timing. From Queenstown, follow State Highway 6 east through Frankton; the bungy bridge is about twenty-five minutes out and Cromwell about forty-five to fifty. There are formed pull-offs at the bridge, at the Roaring Meg, and at a handful of viewpoints, but the highway itself is narrow with a solid centre line for much of its length and stopping anywhere else is genuinely dangerous. The Kawarau Gorge Trail links parts of the corridor for cyclists. October through April is the season for river activities and for the Gibbston cellar doors; harvest falls in April and the valley's poplars turn at the same time. In winter the shaded sections of highway ice early and stay icy, and snow can close the road briefly. Petrol is available at Frankton and Cromwell but not in between.