Milford Track
New Zealand tramping track
The Milford Track is a hiking route in New Zealand, located amidst mountains and temperate rain forest in Fiordland National Park in the southwest of the South Island. The 53.5 km (33.2 mi) hike starts at Glade Wharf at the head of Lake Te Anau and finishes in Milford Sound at Sandfly Point, traversing rainforests, wetlands, and an alpine pass.
The New Zealand Department of Conservation classifies this track as a Great Walk and maintains three huts along the track: Clinton Hut, Mintaro Hut and Dumpling Hut. There are also three private lodges and four day shelters available. Most people complete the trail in 15 to 20 hours of hiking over three days, not counting an additional hour or two to reach the first hut from a boat. However, some people run the track in one day. The fastest known completion of the trail and record is by British ultramarathon, trail and mountain runner Ajay Hanspal in 5 hours and 19 minutes and 33 seconds set on 18 November 2023, beating the previous record by David Haunschmidt by approximately 1 minute.
History
The native Māori people used the area for gathering and transporting valuable greenstone. They have legends about the area and the native species found in it.
Coming in from the Milford end, Donald Sutherland and John Mackay were the first European explorers to see what are now known as Mackay Falls and Sutherland Falls, in 1880.
The public source identifies “Milford Track” as new Zealand tramping track. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Milford, Track and Zealand.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q673819. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2023 and 1880.
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This entry incorporates text from “Milford Track” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.