CLAY CLIFFS
● GETTING THERE
● The Clay Cliffs, Henburn Rd, Omarama, are 120km drive from Wanaka and 95km from Mt Cook. Open every day, daylight hours. $5 per vehicle. No camping or fires permitted. Nearest petrol and toilets at Omarama. Motels and camping available in Omarama towering red, yellow and black rock formations up to 25m high, that stretches for nearly 500m parallel to the river.
It’s a site where some canyon entrances are so narrow that only one person can pass through at a time. Fluted columns and pinnacles like arrowheads rise up all around.
The Clay Cliffs are formed from layers of gravel, silt and clay, laid down in million-year stages by the glaciers that once ground their way across much of the lower South Island, leaving great deposits of debris behind.
You can read the glaciers’ narrative on the cliffs and canyon walls. The rock layers are like colossal liquorice allsorts: sharply defined belts of red upon black upon orange upon grey. Omarama means “Place of Light”, and on sunny days, the Clay Cliffs blaze with colour.
Some debris layers are packed and hard. Others are loose rubble. Walk beside these and the vibration of your footsteps is enough to start pebbles pattering down. If you get a day when the wind is whining through the skinny canyons, it’s the eeriest of places.
Wander the central Slot Canyon, which is as grand as anything in Utah or Arizona.
Pick your way through the fissured landscape of gulleys, shingle faces and streambeds. Look for the shrubs clinging improbably to rocks, and the pigeons nesting even more improbably in some cracks. Allow yourself at least an hour to take it all in.
Turn and look back, through the skinny entrances or down the wide slopes above the Ahuriri River terraces, where lupins flower a startling blue in early summer.
You get panoramas of the crammed, crinkled Benmore Ranges, plus the softer foreground tumble of glaciated domes, with their rich Otago tawny-gold tussock.
The Clay Cliffs are an area of warmair thermals, rising up from the rocks and adjacent riverbed, and hawks hang in the sky. You may see a glider sliding high above. It adds to the surrealism.
The buttes are also called hoodoos — a wonderful geological term for such formations, where a large boulder or harder rock layer protects the more crumbly aggregate beneath.
Treat the Clay Cliffs carefully. Carefully because the tracks are rough, narrow and slippery in wet weather. If it’s very wet, knee-deep torrents can come bursting out of the canyon entrances. You’ll need decent footwear, whatever the weather.
Treat them courteously as well. They’re on private land. And they’re fragile. Don’t take that glowing red pebble away with you. Twenty others may come tumbling down as a result.
Follow the classic tourist code instead and take only photos. The combination of multicoloured walls, craggy shapes and rich-blue sky makes for memorable images. Even our stone-aged 35mm camera managed dozens.