In the summer of 1907–8, Blanche Baughan went for a walk in the newly established State Reserve in Fiordland. She followed the track that had been cut by Quintin Mackinnon in 1888 from Lake Te Anau, through the bush and over the pass to Milford Sound. Initially fuelled by private enterprise, the various tourist activities of the area – huts, steamers, guiding, and the track itself – had been taken over by the Tourist Department in 1903. Baughan's account of her experience, The Finest Walk in the World, was published in the London Spectator in September 1908, reprinted in a number of local newspapers, enlarged for local publication as ‘an exquisite booklet’, reprinted four times between 1909 and 1926, and included in two collections of her travel writing, Studies in New Zealand Scenery (1916) and Glimpses of New Zealand Scenery (1922).

The work is a distillation of the concerns and ambitions of late colonial New Zealand, ‘Maoriland’ in Australian parlance, a descriptor enthusiastically taken up locally as a way of distinguishing what made New Zealand unique and consequently marketable among other settler societies within the British Empire. Charles Baeyertz's semi-official Guide to New Zealand, ‘authorised by the New Zealand Government’, which went through multiple editions between 1902 and 1912, succinctly identifies these points of difference on his title page: ‘The most wonderful Scenic Country in the World. The home of the Maori. The Angler's and Deerstalker's Paradise’.

The product of this official push to sell the beauties of the landscape to the world, Baughan's ‘booklet’ is oriented towards external approval. Its claim to attention is the sublimity of the landscape – ‘wedding beauty to wonder’, ‘full of a bewildering glory’ – and the challenge to extend the reach of poetic language to measure it adequately:

Too insecure to stand alone, much of this language works through simile and contrast – nothing is; it is always like, or better than. To this end, the essay is punctuated by comparisons with the landscapes of other countries.