By Ross Purnell
Mount Owen stoically pushes up through the fog and clouds of the Tasman District of the South Island of New Zealand, and at 1,875 meters (6,150 feet) above sea level is the highest peak in Kahurangi National Park. Its spectacular marble karst geology makes it a major draw for hikers, photographers, cavers, and scientists of all kinds. The marble’s surface is incredibly featured by erosion, with deep slots and trenches—some of them paper-thin fissures, others as wide as hallways. Where one slot ends, another begins nearby as though some giant dragon had raked and cut the stone.
It’s an otherworldly setting, so much so that scenes from The Lord of the Rings were filmed here. When Gandalf fell into the abyss with the Balrog, and the rest of the fellowship exited the mines of Moria into what Tolkien described as Dimrill Dale, they were actually on Mount Owen. And Mount Owen actually is riddled with underground caverns and mazes, including Bulmer Cavern, New Zealand’s longest cave system, which has been mapped and explored to depths of 50 miles.
The mountain and the name “Owen” have a circular historical connection. The mountain is named after English biologist Richard Owen, who studied the bones of extinct species and first coined the term “dinosaur” in 1841. While Owen was working with sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, they eventually used fossilized bones as a framework and were the first to create sculptures of what dinosaurs might have looked like.
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