Harper Pass
Harper Pass (elevation ), previously known as Hurunui Pass or sometimes Taramakau Pass, is an alpine pass between Canterbury and the West Coast in New Zealand. It was the most important crossing for Māori to obtain pounamu. The first European crossed the pass in 1857 and the leader of the second party later that year, Leonard Harper, gave the pass its current name. It was of some interest to the settlers as the West Coast was part of Canterbury Province and it remained the only feasible route for some years. When the West Coast Gold Rush started in 1864 , it became a heavily used crossing and remained so until October 1865, when a dray road over Arthur's Pass opened. The Arthur's Pass route was upgraded in March 1866 to coach traffic standard, and the much less direct route over Harper Pass fell out of use. It was restored in the 1930s as a tramping route and the Harper Pass Track, a four or five-day tramp, is today part of Te Araroa over its entire length. History. The pass was the most important route across the Southern Alps / Kā Tiritiri o te Moana for Māori to obtain  pounamu (greenstone) from the West Coast; the pass received only seasonal use. To Māori, the pass was known by either name of the rivers that flow from it: the Taramakau River on the western side and the Hurunui River on the east. The first Europeans went over the pass in 1857. In September of that year, Edward Dobson led a party consisting of the surveyor Joseph Taylor, Mr Mason, and Christopher Edward Dampier over the pass. They went only a short distance past the saddle before they were stopped by four days of bad weather, after which they returned to  the Hurunui River. Dobson misjudged the height of the pass (he thought it to be about high) and the West Coast river that they encountered (he thought he had entered the Buller River, now known as the Arahura River, which is further south-west). On 4 November 1857, just two months later, Leonard Harper set off from Mr. Mason's station on the Waitohi River to also cross the pass; he had Mr Loch with him and four Māori from Kaiapoi. Once they reached the Taramakau, they encountered flooding and built a mogihi (a raft made from flax stalks). They  reached the West Coast 23 days after setting off, and took 14 days for the return journey to Mr. Mason's farm. But before they returned, they travelled along the coast as far south as the Waitangitāhuna River (i.e. just north of the Ōkārito Lagoon). The party returned to Christchurch in January 1858. Since that expedition, the pass has been called Harper Pass. After gold was discovered in May 1861 in Otago, the search for gold in Canterbury also started, with the Canterbury Provincial Council offering a NZ£1,000 reward for discovery of gold in a "locality reasonably accessible to Christchurch