On Thursday night a convoy of about 50 vehicles - containing mostly tourists - left the Aoraki Mt Cook area, though nobody was endangered by the large fire which began on Wednesday night at Pukaki Downs.
Fire and Emergency New Zealand incident controller Stephen Butler told RNZ that about 10.4 millimetres of rain had fallen at Pukaki and the winds had died down.
Butler said 42mm of rain had fallen at Glentanner.
"That's huge relief for us. The best thing about that for us is that the cloud's actually quite high so we have got a chopper in the air this morning with our operations manager doing a fly over so that we can get situation awareness of what's actually happening before we have our briefing at 7.30[am].
"The fire is looking a lot better than what it was yesterday.
"The rain and snow mean our crews can focus their efforts on the fire breaks, as well as opening up burnt slash piles to expose deep-seated fires to the rain,".
He says good progress had been made and heavy machinery was being used to increase the fire breaks, concentrating around the northern perimeter of the fire.
"We’ve had to stand down helicopters for the day due to the weather conditions but calmer and frosty conditions forecast for tomorrow mean we’ll be able resume the firefighting then," he says.
"Power is back on in the area and State Highway 80 is open, but please avoid any unnecessary travel."
Butler said about 180 hectares had been burnt so far, but no homes had been damaged.
"The locals have done a fantastic job of giving themselves some defendable area around their homes as a result of the fires three years ago so we've learnt from that and they've now got nice manicured lawns in front of their homes and we've cut down trees that were too close to their houses."
Six homes were evacuated as the fire raged on Wednesday night, but residents are expected to be allowed home today.
Another large fire was reported at Mount Gerald Station at nearby Lake Tekapō on Thursday. Rain with the settling snow had also dampened down this blaze.
"Fire crews are mopping up hot spots and will be monitoring and assessing the fire for the next 48 hours."
This fire had a flare-up about 1am today but was contained, Butler said.
