Hollyford Valley

At the valley's end lies Martins Bay — a beach about as remote as the mainland offers, where no road has ever arrived and the alternatives are days of walking or the little grass airstrip. The Hollyford is Fiordland's low road: river, forest and coast without a single alpine pass, and no easier for it.

The Hollyford Track follows its river from mountain beech forest down through tree-fern country to Lake McKerrow — Whakatipu Waitai, a drowned valley — and on to the dunes, wetlands and seal-hauled shores of Martins Bay. Staying low spares walkers the alpine saddles but not the seriousness: independent tramping means booked DOC huts, all food carried, genuine river judgement, sandfly diplomacy and a realistic exit plan, since the full journey is no simple out-and-back. The valley's human history runs deep — Ngāi Tahu trails, then the doomed settlement of Jamestown, whose ruins the bush keeps — and the grass strip at Martins Bay remains the sole alternative to walking back out.