New Zealand
Aoraki Mount Cook National Park is the roof of New Zealand — a 707-square-kilometer alpine wilderness that contains twenty-three peaks exceeding 3,000 meters, including Aoraki/Mount Cook itself at 3,724 meters, the highest mountain in Australasia. The park lies at the heart of the Te Wahipounamu World Heritage Area, a designation that recognizes the geological and ecological significance of New Zealand's Southern Alps, and its landscape of glaciers, moraine lakes, and alpine meadows represents the most dramatic mountain scenery in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Tasman Glacier, at 23 kilometers the longest glacier in New Zealand, dominates the park's eastern flank. Over the past century, the glacier has retreated significantly, leaving behind a proglacial lake filled with icebergs that calve from the glacier's terminal face with a frequency that makes boat tours on the lake both scenic and mildly adventurous. The Hooker Valley Track, the park's most popular day walk, crosses three swing bridges over milky-blue glacial streams to reach the shore of Hooker Lake, where icebergs float beneath the towering south face of Aoraki/Mount Cook — a view that justifies every step of the three-hour return journey.
The night sky above Aoraki Mount Cook is among the darkest in the world. The park is the centerpiece of the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, one of only a handful of such reserves on the planet, and on clear nights the Milky Way arcs across the sky with a brilliance that seems almost artificial. Stargazing tours from the Mount Cook Village use telescopes and expert guides to reveal the Southern Cross, the Magellanic Clouds (satellite galaxies visible only from the Southern Hemisphere), and the countless stars that urban dwellers have forgotten exist.
Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to summit Mount Everest, honed his mountaineering skills on the peaks of this park, and the Sir Edmund Hillary Alpine Centre in Mount Cook Village documents his extraordinary career with exhibits, a planetarium, and a 3D film experience. The park's European mountaineering history dates to 1882, but the Māori connection runs far deeper: the mountain's name Aoraki refers to the eldest son of Rakinui (the Sky Father), whose canoe was turned to stone on the reef of the South Island, its passengers becoming the peaks of the Southern Alps.
Scenic River Cruises includes Aoraki Mount Cook National Park on its New Zealand itineraries as a land-based excursion. The park is accessible by road from both Christchurch and Queenstown, and the journey itself — across the tawny tussock-covered Mackenzie Country, past the surreal turquoise of Lake Pukaki — is one of New Zealand's great drives. The best time to visit is November through March, when the alpine flowers are blooming, the days are long, and the Hooker Valley Track is at its most accessible, though the mountain itself creates its own weather and can be cloud-shrouded at any time.