Aoraki / Mount Cook, located in New Zealand's South Island, is the highest point in the country

The following are lists of mountains in New Zealand^{[lower-alpha 1]} ordered by height. Names, heights, topographic prominence and isolation, and coordinates were extracted from the official Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) Topo50 topographic maps at the interactive topographic map of New Zealand site.

Mountains are referred to as maunga in the Māori language.

Named summits over 2,900 m

All summits over 2,900 metres (9,500 ft) are within the Southern Alps, a chain that forms the backbone of the South Island, and all but one (Mount Aspiring / Tititea) are within a 10-mile (16 km) radius of Aoraki / Mount Cook. Some of these summits are mere shoulders on the ridges of Aoraki and Mount Tasman.

Gordon Hasell was the first person who, by 1960, had climbed all New Zealand's peaks above 10,000 feet. The achievement mentions 27 peaks and is thus counts individual peaks that may make up one mountain, e.g. Mount Haast has three individual peaks that are all above that height.^[1][2]

The 100 highest mountains

These are all the mountains over 2,400 metres (7,900 ft) with a topographic prominence (drop) of at least 300 metres (980 ft), closely matching those on the list of mountains of New Zealand by the New Zealand Alpine Club. Five peaks overlooked on that list are indicated with an asterisk. Of these 100 mountains, all but two — Ruapehu (Tahurangi Peak) (19th highest) and Mount Taranaki (65th highest) — are in the South Island. Tapuae-o-Uenuku, in the Kaikōura Ranges, is the highest peak outside the Southern Alps.

Other notable mountains and hills

Historical perspective

Prior to the introduction of the metric system in New Zealand, the mountains regarded as tall were those over 10,000 ft (3,000 m). Lists of mountains or peaks by height have over the decades been published by the New Zealand government in its official yearbook. The 1920–21 edition was the first to contain a list of mountains and it had six of them at over 10,000 feet.^{[lower-alpha 10][9]}

This table remained the same in the two subsequent editions until 1924, when the secretary of the New Zealand Alpine Club had provided a fuller list of 16 mountains:^[10]

In the 1931 yearbook, Torres Peak was added to that list.^[11] Andy Anderson was the first to climb all 17 mountains by late December 1950.^[12][13]

The 1931 list remained unchanged until the late 1950s, and was used as the starting point by mountaineer Gordon Hasell (1933–2018) to compile an amended list. Not all the mountains had been officially surveyed and Hasell added 12 new ones to the list that he considered likely to also reach the 10,000 feet mark and deleted 2 (De la Beche and The Minarets), making a total of 27 peaks. This list was published in the 1957 edition of the New Zealand Alpine Journal and stood for the next 25 years. It is shown here as published in geographical order from north-east to south-west.^[12][14][15]

Footnotes

Notes

External links

• Media related to Mountains of New Zealand at Wikimedia Commons
• Mountains of New Zealand published by the New Zealand Alpine Club