Lightweight, inflatable boats are changing backcountry travel. Easier to paddle than a whitewater kayak, and more forgiving of mistakes, packrafts are opening up river sports to a wider audience.
Neil Silverwood specializes in photographing some of the wildest, most remote places in New Zealand - many of which have never been photographed before. His images depict the thrill of exploration and the awe of the backcountry and aim to make viewers feel the grit in their socks - wet through, trail weary and alive
Out there in forest reserves, down remote back roads and tucked away in corners of small towns hide giant tōtara, mataī and rimu. A tiny group of obsessive people, guided by old records and half-remembered stories, regularly hit the road in search of these monsters. Their aim: to bag a champion tree, one whose size, age and majesty will put it at the top of New Zealand’s notable tree register.
COVID-19 has Coasters pondering their future. Some see salvation in mining. Others see an opportunity to do things differently.
Poachers are raiding fragile caves to make a quick buck flogging moa bones to the highest bidder. Is it right?
Last October, Chris and Jorinde Rapsey and their two children set off from Cape Reinga to walk Te Araroa, the 3000-kilometre track that runs the length of New Zealand. They lived outdoors for five months and walked an average of 20 kilometres a day. For nine-year-old Elizabeth and six-year-old Johnny, it was an immersive education—a form of learning increasingly absent from the lives of young New Zealanders, even as international research affirms the importance of children spending time in nature.
Since humans arrived in New Zealand, we’ve lost nearly half of our native terrestrial bird species. Some of those extinct icons are well known, while others are recalled only by myth and bones. We will probably never know the full polyphony of that primordial dawn chorus, but old bones and new science are giving us a richer picture of life in the land of birds, back when they still ruled the roost. For the first time, we’re able to answer questions about what they ate, where they came from, how they were related to each other, and how they got so much bigger, heavier, and weirder than their ancestors.
The Paparoa Track, set to open in September 2019, is the first new Great Walk in 25 years, and the first built for shared use between walkers and cyclists. Traversing the coal-rich hills between Blackball and Punakaiki, it will pay its respects to the 29 men who lost their lives in the Pike River Mine.
Packs of kea are reliable entertainers in places such as Arthur’s Pass or Glacier Country, and new research is showing that kea are smarter and have more complex communication than previously thought. But large flocks in tourism hotspots conceal the fact that kea numbers are dramatically falling across the Southern Alps. Why is this? How can we reverse it? And what do we still have to learn about them?
Antarctica is a puzzle that science is racing to solve. The continent shifts from stable to unstable, frozen to melting, without much warning—and we don’t know why, or how. This switch hasn’t taken place in the century we’ve been observing it. But Antarctica has its own records that go back millennia, buried in the sea floor beneath hundreds of metres of ice. To retrieve them, a New Zealand-led expedition journeyed to the heart of the Ross Ice Shelf—a featureless, inhospitable expanse the size of France.
Earlier this week, a team of 10 left Scott Base to travel to the heart of the Ross Ice Shelf—the longest traverse undertaken by a New Zealand group since Sir Ed's trip to the South Pole. New Zealand Geographic photographer Neil Silverwood is one of them.
Photographer Neil Silverwood takes part in Antarctic Field Training—an overnight course on how to live and work in Antarctica's extreme conditions.
Photographer Neil Silverwood has just arrived at Scott Base on assignment for New Zealand Geographic, along with a large group of scientists starting their summer research.
In the heart of the Waikato there’s a multimillion-dollar industry based on a gnat. Glowworms are big business, attracting well over half a million people a year to Waitomo and prompting some to shift from working the land above ground to commercialising the creatures below it. But keeping the caves and their thousands of tiny performance artists in good health requires round-the-clock care.
Morgan Gorge, a spectacular chasm on the South Island’s West Coast, is a showpiece of whitewater power. Although it has been paddled by fewer than a dozen people, it is the aspiration of kayakers here and around the world to tackle its supreme challenge. If the Minister of Conservation grants a concession to electricity company Westpower to build a hydro-generation scheme on the Waitaha River—as she says she intends to do—Morgan Gorge will become an emaciated trickle for much of the year. Opponents say this would be an environmental tragedy and a cultural loss, tantamount to building a windfarm on the summit of Aoraki/Mt Cook.
New Zealand’s 11 wilderness areas offer adventure, solitude and a glimpse of the world as it was. But what does the future hold for what one tramper termed our “hunting grounds for the imagination”?
Around New Zealand’s coastline by foot, raft, etc...
Water pounds my chest and face. Bracing with my legs against the mossy wall, I try to pendulum on the rope and sidestep out of the water, but it has me pinned to the spot. After years of rock climbing I thought abseiling would be the easy part, but this feels all wrong...
A small group of New Zealand’s elite cavers are pushing further than ever before into the marble heart of the Arthur Range, west of Nelson. To date, they’ve discovered 14 kilometres of previously unknown passages, and now, battling extreme cold, exhaustion and unrelenting rock, they are a hair’s breadth from connecting two of the country’s biggest and deepest cave systems.
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