TorontoOntario · 36 tours
Niagara FallsOntario · 25 tours
New York CityNew York · 30 tours
Las VegasNevada · 8 tours
San FranciscoCalifornia · 16 tours
VancouverBritish Columbia · 17 tours
DubaiUAE · 54 tours
Abu DhabiUAE · 5 tours
Buenos AiresArgentina · 23 tours
AthensGreece · 31 tours
AucklandNew Zealand · 38 tours
CancunMexico · 54 tours
No destinations match “”. Try searching all tours instead — that search understands full questions, not just place names.
A confirmed private 4WD tour through the real, historic Skippers Canyon.
A confirmed private tour for your group only, in a real 4WD, through Skippers Canyon's genuine gold-mining history.
This is confirmed as a private tour: "there will be no other guests, just your party, your trip." Real stops include Hell's and Heaven's Gates, Lighthouse Rock, the Shotover River, the Skippers suspension bridge, the historic Skippers township and school house, and gold panning at Deep Creek.
A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.
Meeting point in Queenstown.
"Just your party, your trip."
Genuine hands-on activity at Deep Creek.
Real, preserved gold-rush heritage.
Back to your hotel, home, or the airport — whenever your day wraps up.
A confirmed private tour for your group only, in a real 4WD, through Skippers Canyon's genuine gold-mining history. This is confirmed as a private tour: "there will be no other guests, just your party, your trip." Real stops include Hell's and Heaven's Gates, Lighthouse Rock, the Shotover River, the Skippers suspension bridge, the historic Skippers township and school house, and gold panning at Deep Creek.
Gold was discovered here in November 1862, when Thomas Arthur and Harry Redfern pulled around four ounces of gold from the river at what's now Arthurs Point in just three hours — one of the fastest-moving gold strikes in Otago's history, and the spark for one of the region's largest gold rushes. Miners who worked the Shotover River afterwards called it "the richest river in the world," though no official records survive to say exactly how much gold actually came out of it; what's certain is that for a few frantic years, Skippers Canyon held a working population in the thousands.
The road you'll travel on this tour is itself a genuine piece of that history. It was surveyed around 1883 and cut by hand into the sheer schist walls of the gorge by four separate contracting crews over roughly seven years, with no machinery beyond picks, shovels, and explosives. The local rock made it a maintenance headache from the start — turning to dust in dry weather and greasy mud whenever it rained — and motor vehicles were actually banned from using the road in its early years, long after it had already proven itself too narrow and precipitous for casual traffic.
Skippers Bridge, which this tour crosses, tells its own part of the story. The original suspension bridge here, built from 1866, sat only about 6 metres above the river and kept getting damaged by floods. Its much higher replacement — roughly 100 metres above the water, spanning the gorge between sheer rock walls — was built between 1898 and 1900 and officially opened in March 1901 by the Minister of Mines, by which point the first wave of the rush had already largely passed and only the hardier miners remained.
What's left today along this route — Hell's and Heaven's Gates, Lighthouse Rock, the Skippers suspension bridge, and the preserved Skippers township and school house — are real, physical survivors of that era, not reconstructions. Panning for gold at Deep Creek on this tour puts you doing, in miniature, exactly what those first miners were doing in the 1860s.
Every Voyzo tour is a starting point — tell us what you have in mind and we'll build it.
