Okarito

One of our favourite walks at Okarito is the Trig walk, which starts at the carpark and climbs up to a great vantage point overlooking the lagoons, forests and mountains of Westland National Park. It was originally used as a reference point for early trigonometric surveys to map the area, hence the name. The surveyors used theodolites to measure the bearing and angle of various other reference points and were able to calculate the height of the mountains with amazing accuracy, considering the equipment they used. No such thing as a GPS or even stereo aerial photo back then The platform there is a great place to have a picnic and look out to the Southern Alps including our highest mountains, Cook and Tasman. Both the Okarito and Three Mile lagoons are also visible from the trig. In the early days of the Okarito Brown Kiwi (Rowi) program conservation staff used to survey kiwi from there using radio receivers tuned to a transmitter on the kiwi. Now most of this work is done remotely with an aircraft, yet  another example of technology making our work easy.