Mount Taranaki
Călin / Apr 22 - Apr 25, 2023
ANZAC day is a national holiday in New Zealand, commemorating those killed in war and honoring the people serving in the military. This makes it the equivalent of both Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day in the US. It is celebrated on Apr 25, the day of the Australian and New Zealand soldiers landing at Gallipoli in 1915. Since this year it fell on a Tue, we made it a long weekend and a birthday present – a trip to explore Mounga Taranaki.
We set our base in New Plymouth, a cute city about 30 km from Egmont National Park, dominated by the mighty Mount Taranaki. The city has a bit of everything, museums, art galleries, an 11 km coastal walkway, and a few restaurants.
The coastal walk is quite exquisite – well maintained and with various pieces of art spread throughout, including the Te Rewa Rewa bridge. Unfortunately, the bridge is undergoing maintenance, so I couldn’t get the iconic picture of Mt. Taranaki enclosed within the bridge structure. Mount Taranaki itself was hiding a bit this morning as well.
Much of the drive from Auckland to New Plymouth was cloudy and rainy. However, Sunday showed up bright and for the rest of our stay we had good weather. We planned to do the Pouakai Crossing since it would allow us to explore Mount Taranaki both close and from a distance. We expected that we won’t complete the hike in one day, so we split it into two hikes, one from each end of the track.
On Sunday, we started from the North Egmont Vistior center. Getting there we entered a layer of fog, but luckily when we crossed it, the mountain was in the clear!
The rest of the plateau was under a layer of fog (or rather clouds?), with Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe sticking above the clouds.
But like any good ahead-of-time plan, it didn’t quite work as such, first because hiking with Victor takes a bit longer than specified by the DoC, and second, Anca’s equipment malfunctioned – the soles of her boots fell off as the glue dried out over the years. And thus, after climbing most of the way, Anca and Victor turned back while I continued further. The track goes along the mountain, swinging close into valleys and out onto the ridges of the lava flows.
You can see the peak when you are out on a ridge and the lava flows when you’re in.
The weather was gorgeous, but the mountain makes its own weather, so mid-afternoon, clouds moved in.
The mountain showed itself in its full splendor, late afternoon as we drove back to the city.
Contrast this image with the first picture, taken from exactly the same spot a day later. Overnight, it rained a bit, but of course, at an altitude of 2518 m, on Mount Taranaki it snowed! And it gathered a whole new set of clouds, so we started our Monday with a pair of rainbows on our way to the track head on Mangorei Road. We have not seen as many rainbows throughout our lives as we’ve seen in New Zealand in the past few months, and certainly I have not seen rainbows coming in pairs.
On Monday we climbed from Mangorei Road to Pouakai Tarns, a roughly 6 km track that is a continuous boardwalk. The amount of work that volunteers and DoC have put into these trails is astonishing.
Pouakai Tarns is the spot that photographers use for the iconic pictures of Mount Taranaki. From there you can see its almost perfect conical shape, and people use the tarns, which are in fact quite small, to get a reflection of the mountain giving the impression that it’s a large lake. However, the mountain decided that today was not going to show up, clouds were swirling around its top. It did graced us with a rainbow though!
As we coming back, we saw a fair number of people climbing to catch the sunset on the mountain. And I expect they were in luck, as the mountain cleared and showed itself in full glory.
This was one of our best trips – with Anca and Victor; the Tongariro crossing that I did with Dan and Parley in December was also awesome, but I didn’t get to write about it yet. And Kahurangi was also nice, but much more peaceful. Taranaki is one hell of a mountain, one can say with a strong personality – and indeed the mountain has been granted “living person status”. I really enjoyed the hikes, and since we only saw its Northern and Western sides, it begs that we go back and explore it more.