Stream Various

Greater watershed Dart River/Te Awa Whakatipu → Lake Wakatipu → Kawarau River → Clutha River → Pacific Ocean

Height Various. See below.

Form Mostly multi-step

Volume Mostly small

General location Mt Aspiring National Park

Specific location heading upstream along the Dart River from the end of the Glenorchy-Paradise Road

Trail access The Dart-Rees Track parallels the river for most of its length, so one could probably scramble down to the river bed for views of any of the falls that aren't visible from the trail. The Five Passes tramping route (not a trail exactly) goes right past the base of the falls on its way out of the wilderness. Note that the Dart River, while shallow, is very cold and very swift and rises very quickly, so I'd avoid crossing it on foot if at all possible. Alternately, if you're a fat tourist like me, you can take a jetboat up the river, or charter a scenic flight or similar. 

Bonus waterfalls Well, around here you're spoiled for choice. There's a similar number of large waterfalls in the Rees River valley, a sizeable (284m, apparently) waterfall in the Earnslaw Burn valley, and if you're keeping an eye out on the drive down the Queenstown-Glenorchy road there's a white patch on pretty much every drainage coming down from the mountains on either side of the lake. Chances are, if you come across some flowing water in the area, it's going to flow over a waterfall at some point.

 

It's a somewhat odd thing about human psychology that one waterfall is a tramping destination, two or five waterfalls are a world-class tramping destination, yet a hundred waterfalls are barely worth remarking on. If Lake Unknown Falls were in the Kaikouras instead of the Southern Alps, it would be a famous and well-documented waterfall—a trail would likely have been blazed to the base of its 150-meter (492-foot) main drop, the equal of the Stirling and Bowen Falls in Milford Sound in impressiveness, and with a total height that appears to be somewhere between 600 and 700 meters (2000-2300 feet) it would keep up a friendly rivalry with Sutherland Falls and Doubtful Sound's Browne Falls for the title of highest in New Zealand. Instead it had the misfortune to be situated in the incredibly scenic Dart River Valley, whose many tributaries are adorned with numerous other (smaller, but no less visible) waterfalls, and just over a ridge from the Hollyford Valley, Milford Sound and the main tourist routes—and even though a fairly well frequented tramping route passes within sight of it the trampers are still absorbing the views of the Southern Alps and the Olivine Ice Plateau and other such fabled wonders that they had from the high country, and thus are a little jaded about little things like giant waterfalls. (Also, the most scenic part of the falls is about 500-600 meters up from the base, and there's no trail. Not a trek most people are very enthusiastic about after 4 to 6 days of hard tramping.)

 

Lake Unknown Falls—unnamed on the maps, but that's what our guide called it—drops out of a small lake, which is not so unknown now that one can charter a floatplane to land on it, and proceeds to crash down the side of Mt Nox more or less continuously for about seven hundred and fifty meters. Officially, only the first 150 m are waterfall, but whether or not one counts the steep cascade immediately below that top bit, there's another unquestionably legitimate waterfall halfway down (with what appears to be a large roostertail in the top) followed by what looks like a steep series of slides down into the Beans Burn, which empties into the Dart shortly downstream. The best views are from the river flats across the valley, roughly where the 47 line intersects the river on this map: