Qualla: Blue Lake (Otago)

Blue Lake (Otago): Introduction

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jenn G, CC BY 2.0. There used to be a hill here. Kildare Hill rose 120 metres above the Central Otago plateau near Saint Bathans, an unremarkable bump in a landscape of tawny tussock and schist outcrops. Then, in 1873, a man named John Ewing pointed high-pressure water cannons at it and started washing it away. Sixty years later, the hill was gone. In its place sat a hole 68 metres deep - the deepest hydraulic mining excavation in the world at the time. When the miners finally walked away in 1932, groundwater and rain did what water does: filled the void. The result is Blue Lake, a startlingly vivid turquoise pool that looks like it belongs in a tropical postcard, not in the dry, golden hills of inland Otago. It is a lake that exists because someone removed a mountain, and it is beautiful in the way that only accidental things can be.

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Image: Jenn G | CC BY 2.0

Blue Lake (Otago): The Man Who Ate a Hill

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 1: NASA Earth Observatory upload by Norman Kuring and 2: public domain by its author, Furius at the Wikipedia project, Public domain. John Ewing was not a patient prospector with a pan and a dream. He was an industrialist. Born in 1844, he formed the St. Bathans Channel Company and introduced hydraulic elevating to the Kildare Hill Gold Claim - a technique that used pressurized water to blast gold-bearing grave...

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Image: 1: NASA Earth Observatory upload by Norman Kuring and 2: public domain by its author, Furius at the Wikipedia project | Public domain

Blue Lake (Otago): Bankruptcy and the Second Company

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Schwede66, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ewing's story did not end well. By 1905 he was bankrupt, undone not by the Kildare Hill claim itself but by poor investments elsewhere. The claim passed to the Scandinavian Water Race Company, which restarted operations with fresh capital and a new approach to the tailings proble...

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Image: Schwede66 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Blue Lake (Otago): The Accidental Jewel

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Schwede66, CC BY-SA 4.0. What happened next required no human effort at all. Rainfall and natural drainage from the surrounding hills slowly filled the abandoned pit with water. The resulting lake took on a vivid blue-green color - a product of the minerals in the exposed rock and the clarity of the grou...

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Image: Schwede66 | CC BY-SA 4.0