Challenge of the Milford Track

Press, 12 October 1988, Page 16

Challenge of the Milford Track

It is 100 years next Sunday since Quintin Mackinnon discovered the pass which opened up the Milford Track. New Zealand’s best known walk is the subject of "Great Walks of the World,” screening on Monday, October 17, at 7 p.m. on One. Peter Hayden, a well known presenter of natural-history programmes, shares the trek along the Milford Track with Maria Tini, a member of the Ngai Tahu, John Gibson, an awardwinning composer/musician, Craig Petton, a freelance photographer and author, and writer Andy Dennis. TVNZ director/producer Max Quinn says Milford Track in the Fiordland National Park was an obvious choice of subject. “It has an international reputation,” he says, “and each season people of many nationalities take up the challenge of the fourday trek of 55 kilometres through scenic and rugged mountains.” The dramatic landscape of Fiordland was carved by glaciers during the ice ages. Along the Milford Track the legacy of the glaciers cannot be missed — walkers begin their journey at a glacier lake and hike along two perpendicular-walled glacial valleys, separated by a climb over an alpine pass, to their destination — a fiord surrounded by towering mountains which continue below the sea to great depths. While water in the form of ice shaped the .land in ancient times, today water in its liquid form makes its mark on the land ... the area has one of the highest rainfalls in

New Zealand, if not the world. But rain can add to the beauty of a journey. Cascading waterfalls appear from nowhere, tumbling down sheer rock walls. Forest trees are festooned with dripping mosses and everywhere there are unfurling ferns. “The Milford Track is a place where the person in the street, who has taken the trouble to get fit be-

forehand, ... can see the wonders of New Zealand's great wilderness,” says Quinn. “But even with the best of equipment, a well marked track and comfortaible huts, this is not a walk to be undertaken lightly. The rigours of a mountain climate in an area of very high rainfall means an ever-present element of unpredictability.”