Travelbeat Inside Information Update: October 17, 2007 SHEARER’S GOLD FIND PANS OUT WELL by David Ellis When a couple of shearers named Thomas Arthur and Harry Redfern got whisper of traces of gold being found outside Queenstown in New Zealand’s Southern Alps in 1862, they helped themselves to a frying pan in their boss’s kitchen, deserted his sheep station and took off to the site of the find. Start of Skipper's Canyon Road and memorial to Julien Bourdeau, a French-Canadian miner who also delivered supplies and mail until he died at his desk in 1916 aged 87. White-knuckle driving - a hairpin-bend at Packer's Point on the road into Skipper's Canyon. But they needn’t have bothered with the frying pan: they clambered further up the wild-running Shotover River than where the gold had first been found, and rather than having to pan for tiny specks they picked up nuggets by the handful, returning to Queenstown several weeks later with pockets and packs laden with the precious metal. A newspaper at the time quoted them as saying they “picked up gold by the pound” and that “gold lay everywhere in the canyon…” Within weeks of their discovery, 12,000 hopefuls had flocked to the area from all over New Zealand; ship’s crews jumped vessel in coastal Dunedin from where Queenstown drew its supplies to join the rush, and even a Captain Duncan of a British cargo vessel telegraphed home that as his entire crew had gone off in search of gold, he might as well join them… It was a good move: he made a fortune and the area was officially named Skipper’s Canyon. By the time the Canyon’s fields had been largely exhausted over the next fifty years, they had given up more gold than Alaska’s fabled Yukon, although fossickers still make plenty of worthwhile finds to this day. But it did neither Thomas Arthur nor Harry Redfern much good: they both died of alcoholism. Accessing Skipper’s Canyon was no easy task. Gold seekers wearing heavy packs had to clamber through tortuous ravines with schist walls that fell away from razor-back peaks at a near-vertical 75-degrees, and follow hair-raising tracks worn by sheep through mountain passes… one slip and it was a drop of several hundred metres to the river below. To get supplies in and out the government decided on an ambitious 32km road that would zigzag through these ravines and the more rolling sheep pastures, to slowly drop several hundred metres from Queenstown to the level of the Shotover River. The job took 200 men an incredible ten years, including a white-knuckle section whose mere 300 metres that took two years to carve around the almost vertical Pincher’s Bluff. To do this, men were lowered on ropes to drill into the schist, plug dynamite into the holes – and then holler to their mates at the top to haul them up quick-smart as they lit the fuses and watched the rock blast away into the canyon below. They repeated this scary ordeal over and again for twenty-four months. Today the road is one of New Zealand’s great tourist routes, with some of the world’s most spectacular alpine scenery. But it’s not something you take-on yourself – particularly as rental companies don’t allow hirers to take their vehicles into the Canyon. Instead specialist Skipper’s Canyon 4WD companies like Nomad Safaris take visitors on four-hour excursions from Queenstown, their drivers easing their 4WDs around the white-knuckle hairpin bends 100m or more directly above the Shotover River, through the more open sheep country, across an historic 1901 suspension bridge, and to the river itself where there’s time for a bit of gold panning. The tours, that include well-researched historic commentary of the gold rush era, also take-in such historic points as Heaven & Hell’s Gate, Maori Point, Lighthouse Rock, Blue Slip, and the tiny Skipper’s township. There’s also the remains of the Welcome Home Hotel that catered to the original gold miners and continued trading for over 75-years to the 1940s. Drivers also point out the tiny mountain cottage of John Balderstone and his wife Fanny, a dancer who entertained the 1860’s miners at Skipper’s pubs: John wanted to retire after the gold rush to the quiet of the mountains, but Fanny liked the bright lights… so they struck a compromise, and built their cottage exactly half-way between Queenstown and Skipper’s Canyon. (David Ellis Associates) (Photos: Nomad Safaris) Back to Front Page