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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 3, Issue 6 (October 1, 1928)

[section]

One of the most interesting and romantic stories of geographical exploration and discovery in New Zealand—the discovery made by Mr. A. Dudley Dobson in the early ‘sixties, of the Arthur's Pass and Otira Gorge route to Westland—is told graphically by Mr. James Cowan in the following article.

“… Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep, Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as they go the unknown ways, Pioneers! O Pioneers!”—Walt Whitman.

Above the blue-threaded valley of the ice-born Waimakariri as our train climbs steadily towards Arthur's Pass, the grey pyramidal mountains, backed by shadowy purple ranges, rise in tremendous regular slants for thousands of feet. Their aged sides are split and gashed and deeply ravined in countless places; those couloirs that seam the wasting sides are debris-loaded, the work of frosting rain and snow. The bare, short-peaked summits stand out in grey, a company of weary old giants, against the brilliant blue. The glacier-made riverbed is a mile wide; the erratic river was only small portions of it, rushing and growling along in several streams through the grey and brown wilderness of shingle and gravel.

One can picture the ancient appearance of this region in the ages of the past when this Waimakariri (the name literally means “winter-born waters”) was one mass of ice, when a vast ice-sheet in fact, extended over a great portion of the South Island. Glacier action is clearly marked everywhere around us—in the incalculable quantities of morainic debris flattened out over the alluvial plains and in the ice-grooved and polished boulders and cliff-sides. But the glaciers have shrunk back into the higher hills, the heart of the dividing range, and rock avalanches and discoloured torrents of gravel and rock-charged waters take their place.