Ashburton Lakes and Hakatere Conservation Park.

Formed by ice, water, and scouring wind, the park is an expansive open landscape. The Ashburton lakes form a central hub and the braided waters of the Rangitata and the Rakaia rivers are the southern and northern boundaries.
The headwaters of both rivers are notable landscapes – the upper Rangitata (Mt Sunday) featured as the site of the fortress of Edoras in the Lord of the Rings film. Other distinctive features are kettleholes (depressions), found largely in the eastern South Island high country. Kettleholes are a dynamic landscape seasonally flooded, frozen and baked. Plants that survive this environment are highly specialised and often rare. In spring when the water dries out but before the summer sets in they can blossom with thousands of flowers.
Within the park are opportunities for swimming, boating, tramping, hunting (red deer, tahr, chamois and pig), mountaineering, skiing,mountain biking, horse riding, fishing, bird watching, camping and picnicking.
Australasian Harriers (locally called hawks) circle the mountain thermals, swift, but rare, New Zealand Falcon harass flocks of small birds, and the lakes and wetlands are host to a big variety of native and introduced waterfowl including the rare and threatened Southern Crested Grebe.
Brown, rainbow and fontanella trout, and landlocked salmon, populate the lakes. Clearwater itself, with its regular and reliable nor’west winds in summer, is also a sailing haven, especially for wind surfers.
The surrounding mountains soar up to nearly 10,000ft (very high by NZ standards) and reach back to the Southern Alps themselves and the borders of Mt Cook National Park offering some spectacular climbs for the experienced and several peaks offer choice, virgin fields for heli-skiing in the winter.
Our family has owned a bach (bach = very basic kiwi holiday cottage, often built from recovered and recycled materials; an icon of the average working man’s Kiwi holiday experience; gradually being replaced, sadly, by expensive holiday homes) at Lake Clearwater one of the features of the park, for more than 50 years. The bach village there is one of the last places you can still see truly Kiwi basic baches, but by families with modest incomes to create an affordable, unique, holiday experience. Sadly, even here, expensive holiday homes are starting to encroach and even modest baches are now fetching prices beyond the incomes of the families that first built them.
This area with its dozens of lakes, is my family’s summer playground for fishing boating, swimming and tramping. For the more hardy, the winter brings a different tramping experience and, often, skating on the frozen lakes. It can be searingly hot in summer; bitter, clear, crisp, deep cold in winter. There is no electric power, it’s out of cellphone range . . . in short, basic, adventurous and fun. Families have built friendships there that have lasted through generations! These photos were taken June/July on a week-long winter holiday, a solo retreat from the hassles of my home in New Zealand’s capital city. They range across the park and surrounding lands and capture many of its features. There’s some 700 photos to edit down and upload so, if you like what you see, keep watching as I shall be adding more each day.