When Milford Sound became one massive waterfall: ‘‘Nowhere in the world would you see water like it.’’
‘‘We don’t say ‘welcome to sunny Fiordland’." Rain is a part of life in Southland, and residents say it needn’t get you down. Evan Harding reports.
Ray Willett is an adventurous bloke despite being 83 years of age. So it comes as no great surprise when the Te Anau identity says, out of the blue, that if he was only allowed one more day in the Fiordland National Park it would be in conditions similar to early October.
That’s when the rain was so intense that landslides wiped out sections of road and tracks, floods destroyed bridges and trampers had to hole up in bush huts, fearing for their lives. One metre of rain fell in less than three days.
It’s not that Willett, a former guide on Fiordland’s Milford Track, has a death wish.
It’s that having previously witnessed the breathtaking sight of massive volumes of rainfall in New Zealand’s biggest national park, nothing comes close.
‘‘Nowhere in the world would you see water like it,’’ he says.
‘‘There’s only three waterfalls at Milford Sound but when it’s raining like that it’s one massive waterfall.’’
Without rain, and lots of it, the Fiordland National Park, all 12,600 square kilometres of it, doesn’t exist as tourists around the world know it.
Rain generates its lush rainforest and it creates the spectacular sight of hundreds of temporary waterfalls tumbling off steep mountainsides.
It can also create havoc when hitting the mountain tops and rushing into the valleys and rivers below.
History shows huts located near
Co-founder, Fiordland Marine Search and Rescue
rivers in Fiordland will eventually be doomed, Willett says.
Such was the damage caused by last week’s rain it may take a year to fully repair the only road into Fiordland’s Milford Sound – a 120km drive which begins in Te Anau.
However, the Transport Agency is aiming to have convoys of tourist buses back on the road from February 21, if further storms stay away.
The heavy rains also damaged Fiordland’s world-famous Milford and Routeburn tracks – the Routeburn is closed indefinitely.
Few people know the power of mother nature in the Fiordland National Park better than Chris Hughes, co-founder of Fiordland Marine Search and Rescue.
Hughes says the rainfall intensity in Fiordland is ‘‘off the scale’’ and last week’s dump was on another level again, up to 63mm an hour.
His crew winched a family of five – who had sought refuge on the top bunks of a hut as water rose around them – into a helicopter during the storms last week.
He says Milford Sound is even more spectacular when hit by big storms than when bathed in sunshine.
‘‘The Fiordland storms are mindnumbingly big and they make you feel really small.
‘‘It’s the intensity and accumulation of rain, the thunder rolling down the valleys, the wind, it’s absolutely raw.
‘‘You have to experience it to get some understanding of it.’’
The rivers of Fiordland were unrecognisable during last week’s rain dump, he says.
‘‘Some of the big rapids were watery versions of some of the worst kind of hell you could imagine.’’
Fiordland and the West Coast are easily the wettest places in New Zealand.
Milford Sound receives on average 6.2 metres a year, MetService meteorologist Andrew James says.
Moist air coming from the northwest lifts when it hits the Fiordland ranges and dumps rain onto the mountains.
The rain often peters out before it reaches the township of Te Anau – the gateway to Milford Sound – with the town receiving just 1.1 metres of rainfall a year.
Willett says he sometimes hears tourists complain about the rain in the Fiordland National Park.
‘‘Some of the big rapids were watery versions of some of the worst kind of hell you could imagine.’’ Chris Hughes