In December 1991 a rock avalanche stripped roughly ten metres from the summit of Aoraki, and a 2013 resurvey fixed New Zealand's highest peak at 3,724 metres. The mountain is 330 kilometres from Christchurch by road — close enough that Christchurch to Mount Cook Day Tour tours have become a fixture of Canterbury travel, far enough that the drive itself is half the subject. State Highway 8 crosses the Mackenzie Basin, a tussock plain scoured by ancient glaciers. Lake Tekapo and Lake Pukaki appear in sequence, their turquoise a product of suspended rock flour ground fine beneath moving ice. To Ngāi Tahu, Aoraki is an ancestor rather than a landform. Tradition holds that Aoraki and his brothers, sons of Rakinui the sky father, were stranded when their canoe struck a reef and turned to stone; the wreck became Te Waka o Aoraki, the South Island, and the brothers its highest peaks. Captain James Cook never saw the mountain that carries his name. The 1998 Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement returned the summit to the iwi, who gifted it back to the nation. The dual name Aoraki/Mount Cook dates from that agreement. The national park was gazetted in 1953 and covers roughly 72,000 hectares, of which about 40 percent lies under permanent snow and glacial ice. Nineteen peaks exceed 3,000 metres. The Tasman Glacier, at some 23 kilometres, remains the longest in the country, though it has thinned dramatically and now terminates in a growing proglacial lake studded with icebergs. In 1990 the park was folded into Te Wāhipounamu, a UNESCO World Heritage Area spanning the southwest of the island. These are the Southern Alps landmarks that anchor a Mount Cook day trip from Christchurch. Alpine botany here runs to more than 300 native plant species, among them the Mount Cook lily, a large-flowered buttercup rather than a lily at all. Mount Cook Village sits at the head of the Hooker Valley, a settlement of a few hundred beds and no supermarket. The first Hermitage opened in 1884, was destroyed by flood in 1913 and by fire in 1957. Edmund Hillary trained on these glaciers before Everest; the Hillary Alpine Centre commemorates it. The Department of Conservation Visitor Centre at 1 Larch Grove holds the weather boards, the summit registers and the glaciological displays, and charges nothing — entry to the park and the centre is free. Each Christchurch to Mount Cook Day Tour tour ends where State Highway 80 does, at a car park beneath a mountain that outgrew its own measurement.