Style: August 05, 2022

52 Style | Travel
Canterbury cliffhanger
Wānaka writer Wayne Martin takes the time for a detour
and ends up a little worse for wear.
Words & photos Wayne Martin
The approach to Omarama’s Clay Cliffs has an
old-school Kiwi flavour: a rutted gravel road through
grassy paddocks flanked by pivot irrigators, a farm gate to
open and close behind you, a scattering of visitors, and an
honesty-box charge pitched at the price of a cup of coffee.
The cliffs grace the western skyline from State Highway
8 as you near Omarama from the Lindis end; a sweep of
vanilla scars gouged into the distant hills. I had driven past
the turn-off on the Twizel side countless times over 30-odd
years, intrigued, but was always too time-pressed to make
the detour. Recently, I put that right.
At the car park an interpretation panel corrects my
notion that the cliffs were carved by 19th-century gold
sluicing, like those of Bannockburn or St Bathans. The
formations are the silt deposits of an ancient braided river,
uplifted and tilted by the Ostler Fault that abuts the hills and
eroded by wind and rain over millions of years.
A wide, well-formed gravel path winds through bramble
and wild rose hip bushes, rising gradually towards a great
wall of fluted pillars, towering mesas and craggy ridges
looming like a hilltop castle.
The trail narrows, steepens and grows rougher as it
approaches a 1.5m gap between two steepling walls of
stone. It looks like something from a cowboy movie, the
kind of gap where horseback riders thunder through in
hot pursuit or desperate flight. Passing through, I enter
a majestic amphitheatre of rock, its high ridge outlined like
the crater rim of a dead volcano.
The canyon’s life story is written in its slanted layers. A
base of grey/white sandstone and claystone is topped by