A Walk Through New Zealand’s Watery Wild
For more than 30 miles of the Fiordland National Park on New Zealand's South Island, the Milford Track rambles through a landscape haunted by waters.
IN 1908, The Spectator magazine called the 33.5-mile Milford Track through Fiordland National Park in New Zealand “the finest walk in the world,” an honorific still credible to knowledgeable hikers — one fan was Sir Edmund Hillary — a full century later.
New Zealand Travel Guide
A hiker explores the 33.5 mile Milford Track through Fiordland National Park in New Zealand. More Photos »
The park, part of the Te Wahipounamu Unesco World Heritage Site, is of jaw-dropping beauty, a rare combination of rain forest, rushing rivers and glacially carved alpine heights that yields vistas that make you think you’ve stepped into a picture postcard. What’s more, novices as well as hardened trekkers can fully enjoy the delights of the Milford, which offers as much solitude as you could want and ambient water so pure you’re actually encouraged to drink whatever you can reach.
When I was there last February (the New Zealand summer) as part of a guided group of 50 travelers on a five-day trip that included three days of serious walking, the two words I heard uttered most often as we trekked through the wilderness were “awesome” and “incredible.”
The Milford Track, what Americans call a trail, is promoted as physically neither easy nor difficult, with only children under 10 excluded by guide-company policy and hikers over 70 asked just to check their fitness with their doctor. Perhaps it is best put this way: City folks unaccustomed to walking more than a few minutes at a time will likely find the going hard while experienced hikers will consider the Milford, at least in favorable weather, not particularly challenging.
But so much depends on the utter unpredictability of the weather — frequent rain and perhaps even snow during summer in the southwest corner of New Zealand’s South Island.
The number of hikers who can walk the full Milford Track in peak season is limited to 90 a day — 50 with the private guide company Ultimate Hikes New Zealand, which holds an exclusive franchise, and 40 who register as independent walkers with the New Zealand Department of Conservation.
Each sponsor has its own overnight accommodations, and everyone walks in the same direction, north from the head of Lake Te Anau to Sandfly Point on Milford Sound, the route dating from 1888 when two Scots, Quintin Mackinnon and Ernest Mitchell, first struggled up a half-dozen steep switchbacks and through the mountain pass now bearing Mackinnon’s name and his memorial topped with a cross.
Partly because boat transportation is required at both ends, by far the most practical way for travelers to walk the Milford is to sign up with Ultimate Hikes, which sends groups out every day of the six-month season from its headquarters in Queenstown.
It supplies four guides, the considerable bus and boat transportation needed, all meals and modern overnight accommodations in lodges with flush toilets, hair dryers and rooms for fast-drying of clothes for an inclusive fee. Prices are highest in December through March, a bit less in November and April.
For independents, who carry all their own food and bedding as well as clothing, the peak season is from late October to late April, but they may walk without bookings — and in either direction — in the particularly hazardous off-peak and winter months.
Although being part of a group overseen by a company that operates with regimented efficiency may appear confining, there is no pressure to walk at anything other than your own comfortable pace, stopping whenever you want to gawk at the landscape, to take pictures or simply to rest.
“This is not a race; there is no prize for getting there first,” said Anneke, the woman who conducted the required briefing on the afternoon before my friend Anne and I started. “There can be up to two or three hours between the first person and the last person” on the trail, she added, implying that four dozen hikers had almost complete freedom to absorb things on their own terms, with companionship or without.
Indeed, one of my very few uneasy moments came after I stopped to chat with an American diplomat accompanying her fisherman husband on a day’s outing and no fellow hikers passed me in 15 minutes. When I resumed walking, it was in an open area where the trail was a bit ill-defined, and I thought I might have lost it. I had turned back about 100 yards when, to my relief, a couple of my party came along.
One of the guides always remains behind the slowest walker, so help will eventually arrive as long as you stay on the main trail. If you take one of the brief side excursions, you leave your pack on the trail so the “sweeper” guide won’t overtake you.
One thing a skittish tenderfoot need never worry about is dangerous wildlife; the Milford Track has no mammals or snakes, the chief threat being merely that the kea, a large and brazen New Zealand parrot, will make off with your lunch.
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