Mt Dewar & Long Gully, Queenstown, NZ

Mt Dewar

Long Gully

Mt Dewar is a mountain in Otago, South Island next to the Queenstown suburb Arthurs Point. It is overshadowed by Queenstown’s Ben Lomond-Bowen Peak complex to the west and Coronet Peak, which hosts a ski field, to the east.

From a small parking lot just off Coronet Peak Road, visitors can walk uphill to Skippers Saddle. There they have a choice of:

walking up a dirt road to the peak of Mt Dewar (red on the topomap), or
crossing the saddle and following Skippers Road downhill for views of Long Gully (magenta on the topomap).

Screenshots of the NZ topographic map are licensed as CC BY 4.0 by Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ).

Neither of these feel like hiking, but they are scenic and high-elevation.

Times

Walking from the parking lot to the top of Mt Dewar takes me around one hour. I’ve done it twice.

Route

Google Maps calls the small parking lot Skippers Road Lookout. It could easily be full. I don’t recall how easy it is to park by a roadside, but my guess is that it’s possible somewhere.

If you recognize the name Skippers Road, it may be that your rental car insurance forbids you from driving on it. This policy makes sense: it is a dangerous road. But walkers face less risk than drivers do.

Rising out of Long Gully is an interesting rock pinnacle that some people might even climb. On the topomap, it’s just left of the M in Mahers Camp. Maher was probably a gold prospector. I would guess that he and his fellow prospectors climbed it on occasion.

The summit of Mt Dewar hosts some obstructive telecommunications equipment. However, it’s not hard to maneuver to better photo opportunities.

If 1 is an easy track, and 4 is using hands and feet on exposed rocks, I give both tracks a 1.

The summit of Mt Dewar and Skippers Road can be combined in a longer loop hike, which I haven’t done yet: https://hikingscenery.com/mt-dewar-skippers-road-loop.