BIG NATIONAL PARK

Hokitika Guardian, 24 September 1930, Page 7

BIG NATIONAL PARK

ALPINIST’S IDEAL

ARTHUR’S .PASS TO SOUNDS. A big national park, taking in all the serrated backbone of the Southern Alps from Arthur’s Pass to the bounds, where there are already acres of reserve, is the magnificent conception of the president of the New Zealand Alpine Club (Mr A. P. Harper), who, states the. “Post,” recently added to the debt owed him by mountaineers as the pioneer explorer of some of the most inaccessible parts of Wescland’s mountain wonderland, by making repersentations to the Scenery Preservation Board which resulted in the acquisition by the Government as a scenic reserve of 64,000 acres m the Karangarua watershed. This is the biggest piece of land so set apart for many years. By Mr Harper’s efforts this was added to r-he existing Franz Josef and contemplated Cook River reserves.

In all the world it would be hard to find as majestic a series of alpine peaks as extend southwards from Arthur’s Pass to the southern fiords. The taking by the Clown of a lurtber 120,00 D acres in Westland adds to the splendid adjoining playgrounds set apart for all time for the people, cm country unfit for either settlement or milling, and which would otherwise have undoubtedly offered merely the drab spectacle of a struggle for bare life amongst the stumps. Far too much forest has already been sacrificed on poor lands in other parts of New Zealand, merely opening up the way for a tangle of noxious weeds, and even the lower foothills of the Southern Alps offer little to the settler in Westland. What makes Westland unique from a scenic standpoint, however, is the variety of forest-locked lakes and bushclad spurs that jut out into the fertile fiats and craggy gorges with foaming streams, all accessible to the most cursory visitor, and forming a picturesque, dark pedestal for the mounting scenic glories of the eternal snows that have attracted the world’s best climbers to their crowning peaks. There are already reserves under various Acts scattered along both sides of the Southern Alps, at present variously administered. Mr Harper’s aim is to harmonise their control under'an honorary board, including Government representatives, and ultimately to consolidate the whole in a truly magnifipark, parts of which, in his opinion, should be conserved in their wild state, to give hampers and mountaineers the opportunity of exploration as best please themselves. LITTLE KNOWN REGION. South of the Franz Josef and the Fox Glaciers, Westland is little known to the people of New Zealand, because of the many swift and /sometimes treacherous rivers, such as the Cook, Karangarua and others, as yet tinbridged. Tourist traffic, of the comfortable type, stops at the Fox, but beyond that lies some wonderful country, part of which is taken in by the new reserve, covering the Cook River Valley and the Karangarua River Valley. The two blocks of land comprising it. 64,000 acres and 61,000 acres, adjoin each other, and in turn adjoin the Franz Josef reserve, 48,560 acres, and a small reserve of 14,120 acres, making in all nearly 190,600 acres of continuous reserve in Westland. On the eastern side of the Southern Alps, in Canterbury, lies the Tasman Park, 97,800 acres, so. that there is now a block of national reserve of nearly 300,000 acres, spreading over the backbone of tlie central portion of the South Island. Much of it is not explored, and some of it has been penetrated only by the first exploration. Describing the country thus set apart, Mr Harper, who knows it well, having been the first to explore thoroughly the middle branch of the Cook River in 1894, with the late Mr Douglas, since when that country has been visited by no other party, said that in no other area of its size that he had seen, even in Switzerland, was there such a variety and magnificence of scenery.

the valley of the Karangarua offered unique attractions, said Mr Harper. The north branch of the Karangarua was the Copland, from which was reached the Copland Pass, now a wellknown alpine route from Westland to Canterbury, but the middle and south branches were finer in some respects, and very little known. The middle branch, coining from the Douglas Glacier, had an impassible gorge. “The whole river is walled in on the south bv stupendous cliffs, rising to over 3000 ft sheer,” said Mr Harper. “The head basin is the weirdest place I have ever seen, surrounded by precipices, bleak and barren, from which the roar of the ice avalanches from the Douglas Glacier echo and re-echo throughout the day. Dr Macintosh Bell, the late Director of our Geological Survey, and his party are the only ones to- have followed this route, some fourteen years after my exploration, and his official account of it confirms my original opinion that the place is aniline in any alpine region. The hush of the whole valley is the gem of South Westland.”