Kahurangi National Park

Kahurangi National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Kahurangi fills the north-western corner of the South Island of New Zealand, a vast, roadless tangle of mountains, tablelands, forests and wild coast, the second largest national park in the country, and one experiences it from its edges, since no road crosses it. The city of Nelson, with an airport, and the towns of Motueka and Takaka, in Golden Bay, are the bases on the eastern side, Karamea, at the end of the road up the West Coast, on the western, and Murchison on the south, and between the eastern and western road ends lies a drive of six to seven hours. Entry is free. The famous route is the Heaphy Track, one of New Zealand's Great Walks, seventy-eight kilometres from the Aorere valley in Golden Bay to the coast north of Karamea, walked in four to six days, with huts and campsites that must be booked, crossing beech forest, the open tussock of the Gouland Downs, and lush lowland forest to finish along a surf-beaten shore under nikau palms;

in the winter months it is open to mountain bikes. For a day, the best objective from Nelson and Motueka is the Flora car park, at 930 metres, reached by a steep gravel road, from which good tracks lead in an hour and a quarter to the Mount Arthur hut at the bushline and on, in fine weather, to the summit of Mount Arthur, 1,795 metres, or across the Tablelands; private guided hikes from Nelson, with lunch, take this route. Other day outings are the Cobb valley, reached by a long road from Upper Takaka, and, from Karamea, the Oparara basin, where short walks lead to gigantic limestone arches, and guided tours enter the Honeycomb Hill caves. The Wangapeka, Leslie-Karamea and Tasman wilderness routes are for experienced trampers.

Visiting Kahurangi National Park: what you will see

The park was gazetted in 1996, from a forest park created in 1970, and with the addition of the Mokihinui catchment in 2019 covers some 5,190 square kilometres. Its name is usually translated as treasured possession, and refers also to the blue of the sky and of precious greenstone, for the old Maori trails by which pounamu was carried from the West Coast to Golden Bay ran through it. Its distinction is geological and, in consequence, biological. It contains the oldest rocks in New Zealand, sediments more than five hundred million years old, with the country's oldest fossils, trilobites, in the Cobb valley, and a more varied geology than any other protected area, including great thicknesses of marble and limestone, in Mount Arthur and Mount Owen, 1,875 metres, the highest point, which the rain has dissolved into a surface of fluted rock, sinkholes and shafts, and beneath which lie the longest and deepest caves in the southern hemisphere, the Bulmer system, more than seventy kilometres long, and the Nettlebed and Ellis Basin systems, over a thousand metres deep, explored only by expedition cavers.

In the Oparara basin, a river stained the colour of tea by the forest has cut three arches through the limestone, the largest of which, more than two hundred metres long and forty-three high, is the biggest natural rock arch in Australasia, and the Honeycomb Hill caves hold the bones of moa, of the giant Haast's eagle that preyed on them, and of other extinct birds that fell in over twenty thousand years. Because much of the area escaped the ice of the glaciations, it served as a refuge, and more than half of all New Zealand's native plant species, and four fifths of its alpine ones, grow here, some seventy of them nowhere else. The fauna has the same relict character: the great spotted kiwi, the largest of the kiwi, has its stronghold here; the blue duck lives on the torrents, the rock wren, the kea and the kaka in the mountains; and the takahe, a huge flightless rail once thought extinct, was released on the Gouland Downs in 2018, its first wild home outside Fiordland. Most curious are the Powelliphanta, giant carnivorous land snails with glossy shells of gold, red and brown, as large as a fist, which suck up earthworms like spaghetti and of which many species and subspecies live here, each on its own mountain, together with giant weta and, in the cave entrances, a large spider that hunts them. Introduced stoats, rats and possums are the enemy of all these, and are fought with extensive trapping and aerial poisoning.

Kahurangi National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open all year. The summer and early autumn, from December to April, offer the longest days and warmest, most settled weather, with alpine flowers from December to February, and February and March are generally the most reliable months; the Heaphy Track is walkable in every season, being relatively low, and is quieter and open to cyclists from May to November, though rivers can flood and the downs may have snow. The western side receives up to six metres of rain a year, and heavy rain can fall at any time, closing gravel access roads and making unbridged streams impassable.

The marble tops of Mount Arthur and Mount Owen are dangerous in cloud, since the route is easily lost among the sinkholes. Sandflies are fierce on the coast and in the valleys, so bring repellent, with warm and waterproof clothing in any month. Book Heaphy huts and transport between the track ends well ahead. Allow a day from Nelson, a week for the Heaphy. Abel Tasman National Park adjoins it near Takaka, and Farewell Spit lies at its northern tip.