Brunner and twenty Māori set off upriver in four canoes on 26 January 1848. Heading up what came to be known as the Arnold River, the party reached the lake on 29 January. They camped on Takataka (later known as the Refuge Islands) near the mouth of the Crooked River, where they ate kākahi and raupō root, and Brunner smoked the last of his tobacco. His guides told Brunner there was an overland route across the mountains near the Taramakau River, but the group turned back and headed to the Grey and the Inangahua Valley. In October 1857 Leonard Harper, led by Ihaia Tainui and three other Māori, left Canterbury and crossed the mountains at the Hurunui Saddle, known afterwards as the Harper Pass. Heading down the Taramakau towards the sea, he glimpsed grassy flats and the lake on his right, but did not investigate. In February 1859 surveyor John Rochfort followed the same route down the Taramakau, but after camping below its junction with the Ōtira, east of Mount Turiwhate, he headed north through the low gap that led to the lake. On the shore the party made a canoe from a kahikatea log and crossed the lake, which Rochfort named after Thomas Brunner, and exited by the river he dubbed the "Arnould". From January to March 1863 young explorer Herbert Charlton Howitt, who previously explored for gold across the Hurunui Saddle, cut a trail over the pass to Lake Brunner. He initially planned to make a trail around the lake shore to the Arnold River as a route to the coast. In April he decided instead to cut a track from the lakeshore over the Hohunu Range to the lower Taramakau, avoiding the dangerous Taramakau Gorge. On 27 June, Howitt and two of his party set off across the lake by canoe to fish for eels and retrieve stores from their camp at the Arnold River outlet, and were never seen again. The canoe, which sat only three inches above the water when laden, was presumably swamped in a storm, and the three men drowned; numerous subsequent searches turned up only his tent and some eel lines at the lake shore. In December 1865, during the West Coast Gold Rush, word got around that a group of prospectors, known as the "Kangaroo party", had lodged a claim on land to the north-east of Lake Brunner. Eight hundred men