The glare and babel of tourism have left the Nelson cave spider with precious few footholds.
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
The Baton Valley, at the top of the South Island, was named after a young runaway sailor, Batteyn Norton, and it remains a place where life is isolated, physical, self-sufficient, and largely dictated by the weather. It hasn’t been much of a destination since an anticlimactic gold rush in the late 1800s—but the opening of a new cycle trail passing through the valley has put it on the tourism map. Now, its residents are wondering how to retain the identity of their home in the face of change.
Coal warms our hospitals and schools, ripens our tomatoes, makes roses bloom, turns ironsand into steel, dries milk powder for export, and generates electricity when hydro lakes are low and gas production sputters. Coal also releases close to double its weight in carbon dioxide emissions—and, in 2021, New Zealand imported record volumes of it. If we’re to meet our net zero emissions target in time, we’re going to need a game changer.
Miriam Lancewood and Peter Raine have lived off the grid, on the road or in the wilderness for much of the last decade. For them, freedom means being untethered, possessing only the minimum they require. This life of solitude and simplicity has given them a unique perspective on themselves and on the world.
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.
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...
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