A compact park featuring high mountains, massive glaciers, lakes, huts and a wonderful night sky
Driving SH8 between Tekapo and Twizel on a clear day, a panorama of ice-capped mountains unfolds as you round the bend above Lake Pukaki. Sun-baked grasslands give way to an impossibly azure lake crowned with a jagged horizon: the Southern Alps. If you take a right turn, just after the control gates at the toe of the lake, you’ll be on a road that delivers some of New Zealand’s most iconic views – none less than Aoraki, the ‘Cloud Piercer’, straight ahead. Driving this road is in some ways a quintessential New Zealand experience; the drive passes alongside classic high country station runs and a landscape hewn by glaciers. At the end of the road lies Mt Cook Village – a gateway to not only a huge variety of mountaineering, but also to some surprisingly accessible mountain experiences. The Hooker Valley Track is a world class alpine walk and like the Red Tarn Track, is perfect for a weekend wander, while the more adventurous can view the Caroline Face of Aoraki/Mt Cook and Ball Glacier up close, or tramp to the oldest hut in the national park. Visit New Zealand’s longest glacier The road leading to Mt Cook National Park parallels Lake Pukaki. This body of impossibly turquoise water fills a trench left behind by a glacier that once spanned the entire valley and extended into the Mackenzie Basin. Its legacy is carved into nearby mountain slopes, and telltale terraces high on the valley’s sides give a hint of its extent. This great glacier’s terminal moraines can be explored at the toe of Lake Pukaki. Further up this same valley, the 27km-long Tasman Glacier still flows, fed by high névés tucked out of sight. Declining, like all of New Zealand’s glaciers, the lower reaches of the Tasman are not the ‘white ice’ that visitors might expect: here the glacier is covered with a burden of shattered rock and caravan-sized boulders. At the time of the first European visitors to this area, the glacier was more than 100m thicker and the terminal lake did not exist. A 15-minute walk from the Blue Lakes and Tasman Glacier View car park provides a view like no other in New Zealand: the moraine-bearing glacier terminates at a wide vertical ice cliff that rises from a large lake. This ice cliff calves regularly into the lake. If your trip coincides with numerous icebergs, another good viewing spot is where they cluster at the lake outlet – the source of the Tasman River. Spend a night in one of New Zealand’s highest huts [caption id="attachment_22885" align="aligncenter" width="1280"]


