West Coast Region

Water wheel in Shantytown

1SHANTYTOWN

From the bridge in Greymouth continue south on SH6 3.7 km through the town and then 5 km south on SH6 and Main South Road. Turn left onto Rutherglen Road and drive east 3.2 km to Shantytown.
At the peak of the Gold Rush in the 1860’s the area in and around Shantytown was home to over 5,000 prospectors and their families. The gaunt heaps of stones that the miners called tailings can be still seen in the forests that have returned to cloak this once barren landcape. For a few decades the area was alive with Chinese and European diggers who tore into the land with their gold dredges and sluicing equipment in search of gold. Shantytown is a reconstruction of one of the nineteenth-century gold towns, featuring a number of relocated buildings including the old Notown Church and the Ross Borough Council Chambers. The town also has a number of fully stocked period shops, a gaol, post office, hotel, livery stables, a working sawmill and a stamper battery. Visitors can try panning for gold and take a ride on an 1897 vintage steam- locomotive or a horse-drawn vehicle.

2HOKITIKA

Hokitika

Return to SH6 and continue south 31 km to Hokitika.

In the 1860s Hokitika became a goldmining 'metropolis', with a population of over 4000 along with many more miners who were ‘roughing it’ out on the nearby diggings. During these years the port was one of the busiest in the country. In a single day in 1865 a total of 19 ships arrived or left and it was common for up to 40 sailing ships to be moored at the quayside at any one time. To reach the port these sailing ships had to run the treacherous sand bar at the entrance to the harbour. Spectators would line up along the shore to watch vessels negotiate this hazard which involved sailing broadside on to the seas. Between 1865 and 1867 an average of at least one ship ran aground every 10 days and over 40 were wrecked completely. The rest were raised by screwjacks and dragged across the bar to the river in an operation that became known as 'making the overland trip'. You can retrace the history of the town in the West Coast Historical Museum on Tancred Street, and visit the old Custom House and the restored historic wharf on Gibson Quay. The memorial clock tower on the main street was built in 1901-02 to commemorate the South African War and the coronation of King Edward Vll. Headstones in the cemetery at the northern end of the town provide a glipse into the lives of some of these early towns people. Across the road from the cemetery is a dell with the largest outdoor colony of glow-worms in the country. A recent Hokitika attraction is Water World, an aquarium on Sewell Street with giant eels that are fed by divers wearing steel mesh gloves. You can also pan for gold at Phelps' open cast gold mine, 2 km south of the township.

Lake Mahinapua

3LAKE MAHINAPUA

Continue south 10.2 km on SH6 to Lake Mahinepua. The entrance to the carpark near the lake is on the left.
A walkway leads through lowland rimu forest along an old tramline built in the 1920s in the Lake Scenic Reserve, which was gazetted in 1907. It takes about 15 minutes to walk to the lake, where you can often see black swans, bitterns and white herons. Mahinapua was once a coastal lagoon, but over the centuries, sand accumulated along the line of a belt of dunes, eventually cutting off the access to the sea, creating this tranquil lake surrounded by forests of tall kahikatea, miro, matai, totara, rata and rimu. There are a number of short walks along the edge of the lake from the main carpark and you can also take a cruise aboard the paddleboat Takutai Belle, following the historic steamer route down the Mahinapua Creek into Lake Mahinapua.

4ROSS

Continue south 16.2 km on SH6 to Ross .
New Zealand’s largest gold nugget, weighing 2.807 kg was discovered at Ross in 1909. It was nicknamed the Honourable Roddy, after Roderick McKenzie the minister of mines and was later purchased by the government to be presented to King George V in 1911 as a coronation present. Ross lies on the site of New Zealand's richest alluvial deposits and was one of the earliest gold fields on the West Coast. St Patrick's Church, built in 1866 on Aylmer Street, is one of the few original buildings that have survived and is also one of the oldest buildings on the Coast. You can also see the old gaol, and on the corner of St James and Bond Streets, a solidly built little miner's cottage, dating back to 1885, that was the home of a Belgian couple who had struck it rich in the gold fields. Near the cottage, there are a number of tracks making up the Ross Historic Goldfields Walkway, leading to historic dams, sluice gates, mine shafts, tunnels, mining machinery and an old cemetery.

5FRANZ JOSEPH GLACIER

Continue south 108.8 km on SH6 to the Franz Joseph Glacier Township. The Glacier Acess Road is on the left across the Waiho River Bridge. The start of the Sentinel Rock track is 4 km east on the left.

Franz Josef Glacier

Two walks can be made from Glacier Access Road to obtain good views of the glacier. The first and easiest which starts approximately 4 km up the road on the left, is the 10-minute climb to Sentinel Rock, a distinctive outcrop of schist bedrock rounded off by the glacier. When Julius Haast explored the valley in 1865, Sentinel Rock had just emerged from beneath the receding glacier, and although it has advanced nearly 2 km since 1985, the glacier is still several kilometres back from the position it had occupied a hundred years earlier. Small clumps of rata and kamahi can now be found growing on the moss and lichen covered rocks along with the needle leaved grass trees (dracophyllum). If you look further up the valley from the viewpoint, you can see the trimlines on the sides of the valley walls where the ice scraped the vegetation away during the last major periods of glaciation when the level of the ice was much higher. For a closer look at the glacier, continue to the end of the road and the start of a flat, 1 hour walk to the spectacular terminal ice face. From the safety of the terminal viewing point, you can often see and hear huge blocks of ice breaking from the sheer face of the glacier, crashing into the riverbed below.