February 8,2008

Tongariro Crossing -
Today was the day for the tongariro crossing, a 10 + mile hike with a couple thousand feet of elevation gain that goes between Ngaurahoe and Tongariro. Almost all of the hiking is above tree line (which is only about 3000 ft. here in NZ, so no altitude problems) Ngauruhoe is a classic cinder cone volcano, and was used as Mt. Doom in Lord of the Rings. This is the most popular day hike in New Zealand, they estimate that around 100,000 people per year do it. On good weather days, the trail can look like an ant trail with all of the people clogging it up.

The place we stayed at, The Discovery Lodge, runs a shuttle from the lodge to the start, and they pick you back up at the finish and bring you home. The really nice thing about this particular shuttle is that it leaves the lodge at 5:30am and gets to the start of the track at around 5:45am, which is the earliest drop off by about 45 min. This gets you well ahead of the madding crowd and you do the first climbs before the sun gets over the ridge.

So this meant a pretty early start for us.

There were about 30 people on the shuttle from our hotel, and we got to the start, and had a quick run-down of where we needed to be by what time to make the return pickup at 2pm, and we were off.




The group spread out pretty well, and we walked as the sun slowly rose. The we started the first climb, at the top of which we had some great views of Ngaurahoe.



Then it leveled off for a little bit, and then climbed again, and continued up to Red Crater, the highest point of the hike.



There we had views of the Emerald lakes which we were walking towards, and Red Crater, and Ngaurahoe. You could see all of the previous lava flows that had gone down the mountain in the past. It was very obvious that this was still a live volcano, because at the top there were active steam vents venting sulfurous steam along the path we were on.




Coming down from Red Crater was a pretty steep scree slope ( really loose small rocks ) which, if you don't know how to scree run, is very had to get down. But scree running is really fun, it was so deep in places that it felt almost like skiing in calf deep powder. It's kind of a controlled slide as you run. You can really move down the hill well doing this, and it really saves your knees.





The bad part about the way the hike is set up is that the entire 2nd half of it is all down hill, almost continuously so.



This is really tough on the knees. About one hour from the finish the trail goes into a native forest, which feels like a rain forest after being above tree line for 7 hours. It was so nice to get into the cool shade after being exposed to the elements for so long. For the last 30 minutes or so of the hike, it follows a very swiftly running stream,which is unsafe to drink from because it flows out of the volcanic fumeroles picking up nasty chemicals along the way.

We made it to the the finish, with about 20 minutes to spare before our shuttle arrived and brought us back to the lodge. We cleaned up and took a nap...

Tomorrow we travel to Wellington, to get ready for the trip over to the south island the following day.