Arrow River (New Zealand)

Where it sits. The Arrow River rises in the Harris Mountains northwest of Arrowtown, runs south and then southeast through a tight schist gorge, spills onto the shingle flats beside the town, and joins the Kawarau River near Lake Hayes. It is a modest river — thirty-odd kilometres, shallow and clear for most of its length, rarely more than knee-deep in summer — but it drains steep country and rises fast, and its bed is far wider than its usual flow because it periodically fills that bed completely. The gorge above Arrowtown is the interesting part: grey schist walls, terraces of tailings, beech and briar, and a valley floor that has been turned over by human hands more thoroughly than almost any other river in New Zealand.

The river that made the district. Gold was found in the Arrow in 1862, and the rush that followed was intense and short. Miners worked the bed and the terraces upstream for twenty kilometres, and the evidence is still everywhere: stone hut ruins, water races contoured along the valley sides, mounds of hand-stacked tailings, and the remains of stamper batteries. Fifteen kilometres upstream of Arrowtown lies Macetown, a town of several hundred people at its peak, with a school, hotels, a bakery and a brewery, which was progressively abandoned as the quartz reefs gave out. Its last permanent residents left in the early twentieth century and the site is now a historic reserve with two restored stone buildings, a cemetery and a great many foundations under the grass. Some of the introduced fruit trees the miners planted still fruit.

On screen. The Arrow's shingle flats above Arrowtown stood in for the Ford of Bruinen in The Fellowship of the Ring, the crossing into Rivendell where Arwen turns at bay with Frodo on her saddle and summons the river against the nine Ringwraiths. The choice was practical as well as scenic: the river braids across a wide, level gravel bed with mature beech on both banks, which meant vehicles, horses and crew could work in the riverbed itself. The flood was created in post-production and in the effects tanks, not here; the real Arrow could not do it on demand, though anyone who has seen it after a spring nor'wester would recognise the idea. The wooded chase that precedes the ford was shot elsewhere, principally in the Shotover gorge country at Skippers. There is no signage on the river and no fenced viewpoint. You walk upstream from the Arrowtown car park on the marked riverside track and after fifteen or twenty minutes you are in the right place, more or less, along with everyone else.

Panning, legally. The Arrow is one of a small number of New Zealand rivers gazetted for recreational gold fossicking, which means anyone may pan a defined stretch without a permit, using hand tools only — a pan, a shovel, a hand trowel. Sluicing, dredging and any mechanised equipment are prohibited, as is digging into the banks. People do still find colour, in flakes rather than nuggets. Shops in Arrowtown hire pans, and the current boundaries of the fossicking area are posted by the local authority and by the Department of Conservation, so it is worth reading the notice rather than assuming.

What you actually see today. Above the town the valley narrows quickly. The track follows old water-race benches and miners' paths on the true right, crossing side creeks and passing through briar, broom and remnant beech, with the river audible below almost the whole way. The water runs clear and pale green over rounded schist cobbles, with deep green pools at the bends where the current has undercut the rock; in January these are the local swimming holes, and the temperature is bracing at best. Bellbirds and fantails work the beech; introduced trout hold in the pools; and the tailings terraces, once you learn to recognise them, turn out to line the valley for kilometres. The gorge holds shade until late morning, so the light for photography is best from the middle of the afternoon onward, when the sun comes down the valley from the northwest and lights the schist warm against the water.

Getting there and timing. Access is easiest at Arrowtown, where the river runs along the edge of town and a formed track follows the bank. Upstream, the historic Macetown Road follows and repeatedly crosses the riverbed — more than twenty fords in fifteen kilometres. It is a four-wheel-drive route in the true sense, closed to ordinary cars and excluded from every rental agreement in the district, and it is impassable when the river is up. Walking or mountain biking to Macetown and back is a full day of five to six hours each way, and guided four-wheel-drive trips run from Arrowtown and Queenstown. The river is cold year-round and glacially cold in spring melt. Flows are lowest and safest between December and March; after heavy rain or a warm nor'west spell it can go from ankle-deep to unfordable within hours, which is exactly the behaviour the film borrowed.