Fiordland of the Pacific
By “Awake!” correspondent in New Zealand
“THE eighth wonder of the world!” was poet Rudyard Kipling’s description of the majesty of Milford Sound. Though this is not an original sentiment, Kipling, nevertheless, expressed how many people have felt about their first visit to this remote corner of New Zealand’s South Island, twelfth-largest island in the world.
Fiordland National Park is in the isolated southwest corner of the country, bordering the unpredictable Tasman Sea, which separates New Zealand from Australia by some 1,200 miles. From north to south this park extends along the coast only about 160 miles, but more than a dozen fiords cut it up so as to give it nearly 1,000 miles of shoreline. Covering 3.1 million acres (about 5,000 square miles), the park is one of the largest in the world.
The only way to reach most of the fiords is still by boat or by seaplane. But after nearly two decades of work with picks, shovels and wheelbarrows, in 1953 a seventy-five-mile access road was completed to the head of one of the most spectacular of the fiords, Milford Sound.
Gateway to Fiordland
Beautiful, deep (1,468 feet) and somber, the twin lakes, Manapouri and Te Anau, form an attractive gateway to the park. They are surrounded by mountains covered with beech forests up to the tree level at about 3,000 feet, giving the impression that a dark-green velvet cloth had been spread over the mountains to soften their rugged contour.
To the north of these lakes is the Eglinton River valley, a flat, gently rising, sub-alpine valley about a mile or two wide, from which snowcapped peaks climb almost vertically five or six thousand feet on either side. Our road to Milford Sound meanders in and out of glades and beech forest, through unfenced meadows, accompanied all the way by the sparkling snow-water river, one of the finest rivers for fly-fishing in the country.
Hidden among the brown top and other meadow grasses are numerous subalpine plants, so delicately hued that one could easily fail to see them. Determined not to be missed, however, during summer months, are the multicolored lupines, which grow profusely on shingle islands in the river, standing in brilliant contrast with the red, silver and black varieties of beech trees.
Suddenly, ahead of us, at the end of a long, straight, narrow tree-lined avenue, there stands a towering snowcapped peak framed between the forest and the sky. As we drive up the avenue our eye muscles literally begin to strain to keep this peak in focus as it slowly shrinks in size and sinks out of sight! But this is not all, for upon our leaving that “Avenue of the Disappearing Mountain” and entering a clearing, not one, but five peaks come into view, any one of which could have been the culprit of the illusion.
The secret apparently lies in the imperceptible though considerable rise in the road, which gradually obliterates the view of the mountain. However, we are sure that the roadmakers did not arrange that deliberately!
Some sixty miles from Te Anau the road is finally swallowed up in a basinlike valley, perhaps a mile or two in diameter. Where a drain hole might be in a hand-basin is relatively where the Homer Tunnel through to Milford has its eastern portal, looking pitifully small at the base of peaks that rise like gigantic tombstones to 7,000 feet. The silent mountains almost hush a wispy stream that leaps down the side of one of them with that characteristic hiss of falling water.
The tunnel stands above the tree line, so the valley has few trees and what trees do grow are stunted and scrubby. However, among the tussock grass and brown top are delicately colored true alpine plants. In December giant buttercups turn the valley floor to gold, and a month or so later it is transformed again by white marguerites.
Many visitors pause here because the three-quarter-mile-long tunnel has one carriageway or lane and is open for twenty-five minutes each way each hour. Such a pause is welcome to our senses, giving time to reflect on the beauties of this remarkable country.
Down to Milford
Our pause now over, the darkness of the Homer Tunnel serves to accentuate the short stretch to Milford itself. Once we are through the tunnel, a similar basinlike valley greets the eye, appearing more immense as the road plunges 2,300 feet in seven miles of tight, hairpin bends and is swallowed up in the lush growth of native bush, ferns and forest—all evidence of an annual rainfall in excess of 250 inches. Majestic tree ferns predominate in all this greenery. No wonder New Zealand has made the fern its national emblem!
Finally, the road halts at the water’s edge. Behind us is the rain forest topped by peaks increasing in height as they recede five, six, seven, eight, nine thousand feet. Away to the left, southwest, is the famed Mitre Peak, the highest precipice or sea cliff of its type (5,560 feet), while across the fiord a couple of miles is a 5,160-foot precipice tête-à-tête with another that is 4,290 feet high, looking remarkably like a lion chatting with a recumbent elephant! And that is how they are named—the Lion and the Elephant.
What an immense place! To stand at sea level dwarfed by snow-covered peaks is truly an experience in man’s littleness. Drifting down the Sound toward the Tasman Sea in a tourist launch, we can appreciate Kipling’s sentiments about this nine-mile-long sea canyon, nearly 1,600 feet deep at its headwater, but diminishing to a fraction of this depth at its outlet to the sea.
Everywhere we are forced to look skyward and we are sobered by the thought that those precipices that tower a thousand feet and more above us plunge the same distance into the waters below. The heavy annual rainfall in this area, averaging an inch a day in one recent year, contributes much of the green splendor to Milford. On a clear day after rain, literally hundreds of waterfalls stream in glistening threads down the rockbound walls of the fiord. Here and there we pass a colony of seals or of penguins sunning themselves on rocks, the only inhabitants, it seems, of this vast watery paradise.
When the swell of the sea heralds the mouth of Milford Sound and the launch turns around, we are not surprised to learn that the circumnavigator of the globe, Captain Cook, sailed past the entrance, thinking it to be merely another bay.
Not Formed by Glaciers
The captain of the launch informed the tourists that glaciers of huge proportions cut this and the other fiords out of a high plateau during the “ice ages.” The evidence for this was said to be the smooth-sided walls of the fiord, which are noticeably scarred at an almost horizontal angle. This was indicative that something had scraped against and along these walls, and glaciers were said to be the only thing capable of accomplishing this. He may know differently now, though, because we left him a copy of a book that proves that both man and the earth got here, not by evolution, but by creation.
We explained to him that glaciers move by gravity, and for one of imagined proportions supposedly to cut Milford Sound and the surrounding valleys would require a currently nonexistent “mother” mountain of tremendous height to provide the gradient.
Where would the water come from to produce the claimed 600 feet of ice? Evaporation of the oceans has been cited as one source, but to produce sufficient water vapor to condense and fall as enough snow to compact into the needed colossal glaciers would require the oceans to boil! And this at a time when, for hundreds of years on end, freezing conditions would have to prevail to produce these quantities of ice!
How much easier, and in harmony with facts and evidence available, to acknowledge the tremendous reshaping of the earth’s surface by the torrential deluge of Noah’s time. Whereas ice can scar surfaces of rock just as rough sandpaper can scar a varnished tabletop, only water under great pressure, carrying boulders and debris, could gouge deep valleys, loosen and carry away mountainsides, like an ax cutting into a tabletop.—See Awake!, June 22, 1963; September 22, 1970.
We certainly enjoyed visiting this out-of-the-way beauty spot, and we have enjoyed telling you what we saw—gentle beauties of creation alongside manifestations of the vigorous, dynamic energies of the great Jehovah God—all on display on a grand scale in this awe-inspiring alpine park, New Zealand’s Fiordland.