gazetted as Paparoa National Park on 23 November 1987. Landforms The park has unusually diverse geology with a wide variety of coastal, lowland and mountain landforms. The major geological structures that form the park are the Barrytown syncline, the Punakaiki anticline, the Paparoa Tectonic Zone, the Cape Foulwind fault and the Hawera fault. Most of the land area of the park is mountainous. The eastern side of the main range has deep glaciated valleys that run north and south, with towering bluffs and cirques, hanging valleys, and truncated spurs. The western coastline is known for its spectacular and varied scenery and its accessibility. Mountains The Paparoa mountains were uplifted during the late Pliocene or early Quaternary periods. Mt Lodge, the highest mountain in the park at , has rocks that are the oldest in New Zealand. Over the last 10 million years, the movement of the Alpine Fault has separated the predominantly granite and gneiss rocks of the Paparoas from their original neighbours, so that they now more closely resemble the rocks in Fiordland, far to the southwest, than to the relatively nearby main range of the Southern Alps. Karst Rivers flowing from the Paparoa Ranges pass through the limestone syncline, creating subterranean waterways and extensive cave systems that are one of the features of the park. The main rivers are the Fox, Pororari and Punakaiki. Another of the rivers is Cave Creek, site of the 1995 Cave Creek disaster. Cave Creek is fed by a complex cave system. Upstream of the Xanadu and Taurus Major sinkholes, on Bullock Creek (the most northerly on the west coast, others being near Ross and Fox Glacier), a polje of up to about square and deep can form after heavy rain. Bush felling and drainage took place in the polje from the 1870s, but the wetland ecology has been undergoing restoration since 1986. The other large polje in this country is at Lake Disappear in Waikato. The river gorges, confined by high, forest-crowned limestone cliffs, provide a means of access to the park's karst interior. However, in many of the tributaries the gorges are narrow, steep and include waterfalls. Dry, mossy streambeds, karren, sinkholes (or dolines), blind valleys and basins where water emerges from caves or vanishes into sinks are all indicators of the complex subterranean system beneath. Intricate systems of shafts, passages and caverns have been slowly formed by the continual effects