Aoraki-Mount Cook National Park

Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park is a national park located in the Canterbury Region in the central-west of the South Island of New Zealand. It was established in October 1953 and takes its name from the highest mountain in New Zealand, Aoraki / Mount Cook. The area of the park is , and it shares a border with Westland Tai Poutini National Park along the Main Divide of the Southern Alps. The national park consists of reserves that were established as early as 1885 to protect the area's significant landscape and vegetation. Glaciers cover 40% of the park, including the county's largest glacier, Haupapa / Tasman Glacier. In 1990, the park was included in the area designated as the Te Wāhipounamu World Heritage Site. The park is managed by the Department of Conservation (DOC) alongside Ngāi Tahu, the ''iwi'' who are in the region.

At the end of the most recent ice age approximately 13000 years ago, numerous glaciers in the park were tributaries of a much larger glacier covering all of Hooker Valley and Tasman Valley in hundreds of metres of ice. This glacier reached beyond the southern end of today's Lake Pukaki, up to south of Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park. As it retreated, it filled the hollowed-out valleys, leaving behind the U-shaped valleys seen today in the national park. Early European surveyors and explorers ventured into the alpine region surrounding Aoraki / Mount Cook from the 1850s. Many of the geographical features in the national park were named by or after them. The Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act passed in October 1998 recognised the original names of some geographical features, establishing dual English / Māori names.

Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park is home to more than four hundred species of plants, including more than one hundred introduced species. There are about thirty-five species of birds in the park, most notably the rare black stilt and pīwauwau. The only road access into the park is via State Highway 80 which starts away near Twizel, the closest town, and leads directly to Mount Cook Village along the western shore of Lake Pukaki. Mount Cook Aerodrome is a small airfield located southeast of Mount Cook Village within the national park.

Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park is a popular tourist destination. There are numerous walking tracks, the most popular being the Hooker Valley Track, a relatively short track that takes around three hours to complete. The park is also popular with astrophotographers and star-gazers because of the low levels of light pollution. An area including Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park and the Mackenzie Basin was designated as the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve in June 2012. The national park has been used as a filming location for numerous films.

History

Early Māori history

In Māori mythology, Aoraki was one of the sons of Raki the Sky Father. One version of the legend states that Aoraki came down from heaven in a canoe with three of his brothers, Rakiroa, Rakirua and Rārakiroa, to visit his father Raki's new wife Papatūānuku, but the ''waka'' (canoe) overturned. The brothers climbed on to the overturned canoe, becoming the mountains Aoraki / Mount Cook, Rakiroa (Mount Dampier), Rakirua (Mount Teichelmann) and Rārakiroa (Mount Tasman). The ''waka'' itself became the Southern Alps (''Kā Tiritiri o te Moana'').

Although there is no evidence of permanent or temporary Māori settlement within the national park, some artefacts and evidence of burnt vegetation have been found in the nearby Mackenzie Basin. These may be related to nomadic parties who would spend months here hunting moa or fighting other parties. Māori would burn tōtara forests to assist them with their hunting of moa and gathering food, mostly weka, eels and kiore, before heading to the West Coast in search of ''pounamu''.

In 1896, mountaineer Arthur Harper wrote that Māori had a deep-seated fear of the mountains and preferred to stay lower down in the valleys. However, Māori did have knowledge of the various features of high alpine areas, with special words for different types of ice and snow. Historian Johannes Carl Andersen believed it was possible that Māori had travelled over the Main Divide, which is at the northern boundary of Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park, to trade ''pounamu''.

Later history

According to log entries made by explorer Abel Tasman, it is likely that he and his crew sighted the Southern Alps in December 1642 from the Tasman Sea near Barrytown. In 1770 Captain James Cook sailed along the West Coast of the South Island. He sighted and named the Southern Alps but probably did not sight Aoraki. Aoraki was given the name Mount Cook by Captain Stokes of the survey ship HMS ''Acheron'' in 1851, to honour James Cook's circumnavigation of New Zealand. In 1998, the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act officially recognised the original names of the geographical features of Ngāi Tahu's '' takiwā'' (tribal area), establishing dual English and Māori names such as Kirikirikatata / Mount Cook Range and Haupapa / Tasman Glacier.

Europeans have had interest in the national park since the 1850s; public appreciation of the alpine regions surrounding Aoraki / Mount Cook grew with the maps and reports produced by early European surveyors and explorers. Julius von Haast explored the area at the head of Lakes Tekapo, Pukaki and Ōhau in 1862, collecting specimens, making maps and writing comprehensive reports on his observations, and, starting in 1867, surveyor Edward Sealy explored many glaciers. Many of the peaks, glaciers and other geographical features of the region were named by or for these early explorers, such as the Sealy Tarns track being named after Edward Sealy and the Mueller Glacier named after Ferdinand von Mueller.

Public appreciation of the mountains also grew as images of the area began to circulate. Artists painted pictures, and from 1867–1870 Sealy photographed the Mount Cook region. In 1873 the then Governor of New Zealand, Sir George Bowen, visited the Mount Cook region, thereby further raising the profile of the area. Parts of Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park were first set aside as a recreation reserve in 1885, and the national park was established in October 1953.

In 1990, the park (along with Westland Tai Poutini, Mount Aspiring and Fiordland National Parks) became part of the Te Wahipounamu World Heritage Site, the first place in New Zealand to attain World Heritage Status. Following the settlement between Ngāi Tahu and the Crown in October 1998, a number of South Island place names were amended by the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998 to incorporate their Māori names. The name of the mountain village and national park were officially changed from Mount Cook to Aoraki / Mount Cook.

Establishment as a national park

Efforts to protect the alpine environment began in the 19th century. A petition addressed to James Sutter, a member of Parliament, was circulated in November 1884, requesting that the Government protect the alpine region around Aoraki / Mount Cook. Petitioners were concerned that stock grazing and burn-offs were destroying the native bush and vegetation of the area. The petitioners suggested that Frank Huddleston, who had recently bought land at the base of the Mueller Glacier and was building the Hermitage, be appointed as a ranger to oversee the area.

In January 1885 the Hooker and Mueller Valleys were gazetted as the Hooker Glacier Recreation Reserve. In 1887 the Government permanently reserved an area of 97,800 acres of the Tasman Valley above the Mueller Valley confluence, which was known as the Tasman Recreation Reserve or Tasman Park. The Hooker Glacier reserve was expanded in 1890, becoming the 38,000-acre Aorangi Domain.

In 1953, Tasman Park and Aorangi Domain became the Mount Cook National Park. The park as established covered of the Southern Alps, including the Mueller, Hooker, and Tasman glaciers and the eastern slopes of Aoraki / Mount Cook and Mount Tasman. The park is managed by the Department Of Conservation and Ngāi Tahu, the iwi who hold ''mana whenua'' status of the land.

Geography

Topography

The park stretches for about along the southwest–northeast direction of the Southern Alps, covering on the south-eastern side of the main spine of the Alps. Of New Zealand's 20 peaks over , all except Mount Aspiring / Tititea lie within the park. These include New Zealand's highest mountain, Aoraki / Mount Cook, at . Other prominent peaks in or nearby the national park include Mount Tasman, Mount Hicks, Mount Sefton and Mount Elie de Beaumont.

Glaciers

At the end of the most recent ice age around 13,000 years ago, numerous glaciers were tributaries of a much larger glacier covering all of Hooker Tasman Valleys in hundreds of metres of ice. This glacier was about long and reached beyond the southern end of today's Lake Pukaki, up to south of Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park. As the glacier retreated, it filled the hollowed-out valleys with rocks and gravel, leaving behind the flat-bottomed U-shaped valleys seen today. Moraines left behind by the glacier's retreat can be seen in the valleys.

Glaciers cover 40% of the park area, notably the Tasman Glacier in the Tasman Valley east of Aoraki / Mount Cook which is the largest glacier in New Zealand. A majority of glaciers in New Zealand lie within Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park, such as the Tasman Glacier, Hooker Glacier, Murchison Glacier and Mueller Glacier, while further north in the park lie the Godley Glacier, Classen Glacier, Grey Glacier and Maud Glacier. All of these glaciers terminate at proglacial lakes formed in recent decades due to a sustained period of shrinking. Tasman Lake and Hooker Lake are easily accessible via walking tracks and are the only two of these lakes that have official names. Tasman Lake is the largest of the proglacial lakes. Taking a boat tour among the icebergs on the Tasman Lake is a popular tourist activity.

Climate

Temperatures in Mount Cook Village range between extremes of to , and typically fall just over for every of additional altitude.

Rainfall is similarly variable, with the driest months receiving around precipitation, but recorded maxima are in one day and in a single month. Snow falls on about 21 days per year.

During the coldest months of the year, Mueller Glacier Lake, Hooker Lake, and Tasman Lake usually freeze over, at least partially. The weather conditions in the park, in particular at higher altitudes, can be unpredictable and change rapidly.

Geology

The Southern Alps lie along a geological plate boundary, with the Pacific Plate to the southeast pushing westward and colliding with the northward-moving Indo-Australian Plate to the northwest. Aoraki / Mount Cook lies in the centre of the Alpine Fault, a long active fault formed by the plate boundary, which has ruptured four times in the last 900 years. Over the last 45 million years, the collision of the two tectonic plates has pushed up a 25 km thickness of rocks on the Pacific Plate to form the Southern Alps. Extreme temperatures and high precipitation work to shatter surface rock, leading to erosion down the steep slopes. In December 1991, an avalanche of 10 million cubic metres of snow and rock caused 10 metres to be lost off the top of Aoraki / Mount Cook.. The landslide carried with it another 40 million cubic metres of rock and ice.The impact caused an earth quake of 3.9 on the Richter scale. Two decades of erosion of the ice cap exposed after this collapse reduced the height by another 30 m to 3,724 m, as revealed by GPS data from a University of Otago climbing expedition in November 2013.

There are two main rock types in the Southern Alps: sedimentary sandstones and metamorphic schists. The sandstones are greywacke and argillite, mostly to the east of the Main Divide, whereas the schists are mostly to the west of the Main Divide. Rock along the Alpine Fault has been warped and folded into complex layers with much shearing and fracturing. Very few fossils have been found in the rocks of the national park. Parts of the Malte Brun range can be dated to the Permian Period by fossils found there in red argillite.

Ecology

Flora

More than 400 species of plants are found in Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park, including more than 100 introduced plant species such as the colourful Russell lupin, wild cherry, snowberries, and wilding pines. Most parts of the national park are either at higher altitude or in the proglacial valleys such as the Hooker Valley and Tasman Valley, where the soil of the valley floors and moraine walls do not support forest growth. As a result, the only pockets of forest and native bush, such as silver beech and tōtara trees, can be found in the park are along the southern edge of the Hooker Valley and the lower slopes of Sealy Range.

The plant life in the majority of the park consists mostly of alpine plants. Between and in the valleys, the vegetation is predominantly snow tussock grassland, as well as golden speargrass, large mountain daisies (''tikumu'') ('' Celmisia semicordata'', ''Celmisia coriacea''), and Mount Cook lily, (''Ranunculus lyallii''), the largest buttercup in the world. All of these plants flower in the warmer months from November to February – early in the season in the valley floors, and later at higher altitudes. At the highest rocks of Aoraki / Mount Cook, around 14 species of lichen have been found.

The native vegetation continues to be under threat by introduced plant species ranging from non-native trees through to lupins, broom and non-native grasses. These are mostly contained in the valley floors of the Tasman and Hooker Valley, since they are the most accessible parts of the park.

Tutu, a poisonous plant, flourishes throughout the Hooker Valley during summer. Tutu is considered ''taonga'' by Ngāi Tahu.

Fauna

There are about 35 species of birds in the park including the kea, the only alpine parrot, Australasian Harrier (''kāhu''), silvereye (''tauhou''), a small omnivorous passerine bird, New Zealand falcon (''kārearea''), and the pipit (''pīhoihoi''). The tiny New Zealand rock wren (''pīwauwau''), a threatened species, is the only permanent alpine bird in New Zealand.

Small insectivores such as the rifleman (''tītipounamu'') and the fantail (''pīwakawaka'') live in the low forest and scrub, along with small numbers of two larger birds, the kererū and morepork (''ruru''). Introduced species such as finches and sparrows live throughout the bush near Mount Cook Village. The black stilt (''kakī''), the rarest wading bird in the world, primarily lives in the braided riverbed of the Tasman Valley. In 2019, young black stilts raised in a hatchery were released near the Cass River and Godley River. European explorer Julius von Haast reported seeing kākā and piopio in the national park in 1862, however the piopio later became extinct.

The park is home to many invertebrates, including large dragonflies, crickets, grasshoppers, 223 recorded moth species and 7 native butterflies. The black alpine wētā, also known as the Mount Cook flea, is found above the snowline. The jewelled gecko lives in the park but is rarely seen.

Human interaction

Access

By land

Access to the national park began as a rough track from Twizel along the western shore of Lake Pukaki to the Hermitage. The road, now known as State Highway 80, was improved over time. In the 1960s a major hydroelectric scheme was underway in the Mackenzie Basin. This required Lake Pukaki to be raised by , which would submerge parts of the gravel road to the Hermitage, so a new sealed road was built and completed in 1975. The highway ends at Mount Cook Village, with a connecting road leading to the White Horse Hill camping ground. Another small road leads to a car park near Tasman Lake, the start of a short walking track and the Ball Hut Route. A pedestrian swing bridge was built over the Hooker River in the Hooker Valley in 1911, providing easier access to climbing routes.

Rodolph Wigley's Mount Cook Motor Co was formed in 1906 to provide passenger and mail services to the Hermitage from the railhead

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