Landsborough River

I'm standing on this little ridge where like there's deep greens of mountain beach forest and looking down into this part of the valley is quite wide.

You can hear the roar of the Landsborough River and looking up.

up the river all the way up to the head of the valley.

You can see or follow the spine of the Southern Alps almost all the way to Aoraki Mount Cook, which is the highest mountain in New Zealand.

These last three rivers, the Waiho Cook and Karangarua, draw their supplies from the highest and most important part of the Southern Alps and correspond with the Tasman River on the eastern side.

At the head of the Karangarua a saddle leads into the Landsborough River, which takes its rise from four or five first-class glaciers and flows southward along the foot of the main range for forty miles.

On its right bank the Hooker range, a large and important offshoot of the main range, prevents it from finding a direct course to the sea.

After flowing for forty miles between these two mountain chains, the river takes a sweep round to the west and finds its way to the Tasman Ocean at a point sixty-five miles from the Makaro Glacier at its head.

It was well known from the eastern side of the divide that no such pass existed from the head of the Godley to Mount Sefton, and Douglas had been up the Copeland River, a branch of the Karangarua, in 1892, and reported no such pass as required up that river.

Our work therefore in the season of 1893-94 had been the exploration of the Waiho and Cook Rivers, to prove that there was no route such as they required by those valleys, and also to get reconnaissance surveys of this new country completed.

Now, however, we had instructions to explore the Karangarua and its branches, and report on the possibility of a track up this river, over some saddle into the Landsborough River, and down that valley to a pass found by Mr. T. N. Broderick from Lake Ohal on the eastern side of the divide.

This would, I pointed out, be a very roundabout route, but as it would combine both a report on the route and an exploration of the only district in South Westland still unexplored, the authorities decided to have it inspected.