Milford Sound

Milford Sound is a long fiord on the west coast of the South Island, in the middle of Fiordlands National Park. It is the fiord most heavily visited by tourists, hosting a dozen or more cruises per day from the head of the Sound out to the Tasman Sea and back. There is even a nightly overnight cruise on which one may have dinner, sleep at anchor in the sound, and return the next morning, taking in sunset, sunrise, and some of the nighttime wildlife of Milford Sound.

It is also home to one of the two most photographed mountains in New Zealand (the other being Aoraki or Mount Cook): Rahotu or Mitre Peak. The winds from the Sea of Tasman blow in clouds and rain almost every day, so seeing the whole of Rahotu is a rare thing, unless you live there. And no one lives there, because it’s a national park. Even those who work at Milford Sound come in on a three- to four-day basis and live in staff barracks.

Trying to get a photo of this peak of mother nature is, as Sara put it, like attending “mother nature’s peep show.”

Well, we attended “mother nature’s peep show,” and got quite a good peep. The morning of our cruise out into the Sound was a bit hazy, with a small pillow of cloud covering some of the mid-section of Rahotu. But as our cruise pulled out of the harbour the clouds cleared and we saw the mountain in its glory (see “Milford Sound” photo album link at right). It turns out we were present for the third clear day since 24 December, 2005!

The country around Milford Sound is gorgeous. It’s fiordland, which means that glacial activity carved deep gouged out of the land over thousands of years. So the fiords are deep, the mountains around them steep, and the peaks are high. Let me try to give you an idea of the steepness. We were on a five-level cruise ship touring the sound. That means it’s got a good deal of boat underwater. Yet the ship could still sail within forty feet of the rock wall that came up out of the water. Instead of leveling out and forming beaches, fiords just drop down to magnificent depths. Milford Sound, for instance, reaches a depth of almost 400 feet. And boy is that water blue!

The trees and moss in the Sound are amazing. Since the rock walls of the fiords are so steep, no soil can collect. So the plant life is hanging on to the tiny cracks in the rock with its roots. Twenty- and thirty-foot trees grow with little more support and a cleft in the stone. From a distance, the walls of the fiord look like they have dark green shag carpet on them. (The shag is mostly silver beech and riku, native NZ trees.) The carpet gives way, above tree line, to a finer fuzz of lighter green moss. Tree line? That’s right: Rahotu is 1700 metres (about a mile) in elevation. So when you’re in the boat looking up at the peak of Rahotu, it’s like looking up at Denver from Los Angeles—straight up.

Waterfalls! Since there’s no soil in the fiords, the water that falls (almost perpetually) from the clouds at the top of the mountains slides right off and into the sea below. That means heaps of waterfalls (see photo album). On rainy days (almost every day in Milford) there are thousands of waterfalls on every side. We only saw about fifty or sixty, since it was a clear day. Oh, well. We were glad to have the sun out for us.

~emrys