Pūtangirua Pinnacles
Interesting facts
- Horses filmed here for the Paths of the Dead scenes were fed seed-free fodder beforehand so they could not spread weeds into the reserve.
- After the horses were filmed from a helicopter, the crew raked over their hoof prints to leave no trace on the ground.
- Filming conditions also required the horses to come from stables free of gorse and broom, two invasive weeds.
- The scenes shot here show Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli riding along the Dimholt Road to meet the Army of the Dead.
- Braindead, the 1992 zombie comedy that opens among the pinnacles, was directed by Peter Jackson years before he returned here for The Return of the King.
- The gravels in the pillars were shed onto an ancient coast by screes, just as screes still pour gravel onto the shore around Cape Palliser today.
- The pinnacles lie on the western edge of the Aorangi Range, once called the Haurangi Range and the southernmost mountain range on the North Island.
Why it is worth it
At the head of a stream valley in the Aorangi Range, near the southern tip of New Zealand's North Island, the hillside breaks up into a crowd of spires. The Pūtangirua Pinnacles are earth pillars, or hoodoos, and are counted among the best examples of badlands erosion in the country: columns of conglomerate stand side by side, many of them marked by vertical grooves cut by rainwater streaming down their sides during heavy storms.
Their raw material is old. Some seven to nine million years ago, when sea levels were higher, the Aorangi Range stood as an island, and rivers draining it built broad alluvial fans along its southern shore. The land was later drowned again, and only after the ice ages, as the sea fell back, were these fans of gravel exposed. Rain and wind have since been eating into the poorly cemented conglomerate; where a harder cap of cemented silt or stone protects the material beneath, a pillar survives while everything around it is washed away. The pinnacles themselves are thought to be younger than 125,000 years, with major erosion probably starting some 7,000 years ago and speeding up over the last millennium after the surrounding forest was cleared. They are still retreating by roughly a centimetre a year.
The formation lies within a scenic reserve managed by the Department of Conservation, where a track follows the Pūtangirua Stream bed and then climbs to a lookout on the ridge above the pillars. The eerie landscape served as a film location for the Paths of the Dead sequence in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and for the opening of the film Braindead. In December 2019 the name Pūtangirua Pinnacles was officially gazetted for the formation.
Getting there
The reserve lies off Cape Palliser Road in the southern Wairarapa, about 58 km by road south of Martinborough via Lake Ferry Road. Wainuiomata is about 32 km away and Wellington International Airport (WLG) about 39 km in a straight line, but both lie across Palliser Bay and the Remutaka Range, so the road route from Wellington runs through the Wairarapa.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Pūtangirua Pinnacles are a geological formation and one of New Zealand's best examples of badlands erosion. They consist of a large number of earth pillars or hoodoos located at the head of a valley in the Aorangi Ranges, on the North Island of New Zealand, in the Wellington region.
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