Lake Pukaki
Interesting facts
- The engraving on the 1940 five-pound note was based on a 1934 photograph by Bobbie Barwell, who was surprised to find her picture on the banknote.
- The drowned island on the banknote, Te Kohai, became so well known that people called it Five Pound Note Island.
- Pukaki can store about 1,595 gigawatt-hours of energy; together with Lake Tekapo it holds over half of New Zealand's hydroelectric storage.
- Water from Lake Tekapo is diverted by canal into Pukaki, passing through the Tekapo B power station on Pukaki's eastern shore.
- Pukaki is the largest of the three parallel glacial lakes of the Mackenzie Basin, the others being Tekapo and Ōhau.
- Ngāi Tahu once had a seasonal food-gathering settlement called Punatahu on the southern shore of the lake.
- The small Pukaki Scientific Reserve on the western shore protects the endangered moth Izatha psychra.
- The lake's level can be raised or lowered within an operating range of 13.8 metres to balance power generation.
- In August 2020 a scrub fire on the lakeshore burned about 3,500 hectares and took twelve days to extinguish.
Why it is worth it
Lake Pukaki is one of the three parallel glacial lakes of New Zealand's Mackenzie Basin, and its colour is the first thing anyone remembers: a milky, almost opaque powder blue, unlike the clear water of most lakes. The colour comes from glacial flour — rock ground to dust by the Tasman and Hooker glaciers high in the Southern Alps and carried down by the braided Tasman River. Suspended in the water, the fine particles scatter light and turn the whole lake into a single sheet of pale turquoise.
What makes Pukaki one of the great lake views of the world is what stands behind it. From the southern shore the lake runs north for tens of kilometres towards Aoraki/Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, about 70 km away, so that on a clear day the snow pyramid of the peak rises directly at the far end of the water, with the Southern Alps lined up on either side. In the dry, golden tussock country of the Mackenzie, the blue is all the more startling.
The lake was formed when retreating glaciers left a terminal moraine across the valley, damming the meltwater behind it. It covers almost 180 square kilometres and reaches about 70 metres deep. Its present shoreline is partly man-made: as part of the Waitaki hydroelectric scheme, the lake was raised by 9 metres in 1952 and by a further 37 metres in 1976, and today it is one of the country's most important stores of hydro energy. The rising water drowned a small island that had appeared on a 1940 five-pound banknote.
A visitor centre on the southern shore, marked by a bronze statue of a Himalayan tahr, is the classic place to stop and look up the lake. On a clear day the whole length of the water leads the eye straight to the mountain.
Getting there
The lake lies in the Mackenzie Basin of Canterbury, about 7 km north of Twizel, the nearest township. Timaru Airport (TIU) is about 87 km away in a straight line. State Highway 8 runs along the southern end of the lake, and State Highway 80 leads north from it towards Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park, following the lake for much of the way.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Lake Pukaki is the largest of three roughly parallel alpine lakes running north–south along the northern edge of the Mackenzie Basin on New Zealand's South Island. The others are Lakes Tekapo and Ōhau. All three lakes were formed when the terminal moraines of receding glaciers blocked their respective valleys, forming moraine-dammed lakes. The Alps2Ocean mountain bike trail follows the edge of Lake Pukaki for part of its length.
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