Emlyn Lewis Misadventures

New Zealand’s Tongariro Crossing

I don’t know what I’ve been doing. It’s more than a month since I got back from New Zealand. I wrote something about it for The Cycling Independent, but I really should have at least dumped my photos here.

Here’s the brief intro: I went to NZ for my nephew’s wedding. If you go all the way there, you’d be crazy not to try to have some adventures, so after the wedding, my friend Bob and I rented a truck and put ourselves about the business of exploring the North Island as best we could. We rode mountain bikes. We went fishing. We went tubing in an underground cave full of glow worms.

And we did this long hike, the Tongariro Crossing.

Tongariro National Park is a World Heritage Site, filled with towering peaks, lakes, tropical streams, desertscapes and also sites deeply significant and sacred to the Maori people. The crossing is a 19.4km (12m) trek up to high point among three volcanic peaks, overlooking sulfur steam vents and mineral fed, clear blue lakes, some of which are sacred to the Maoris and can’t be approached by non-natives.

If it sounds amazing it is, but that also makes it extremely well-travelled. You don’t get this stretch of trail to yourself. There are daily shuttles that drop people off at the beginning and pick them up on the other side. It’s its own cottage industry. But none of that really matters, because as troublesome as humans sometimes are, the natural beauty of this place makes them a side issue.

Oh, and it’s hard. 12 miles is a long way. The vertical gain is 1100m (3300ft). The footing is pretty tough in spots. And in summer, in New Zealand, the sun is brutal.

It was a great day.

We got the late shuttle, because we chose to drive in from Taupo that morning, and so it was 9:30 or so by the time we got going. The heat of the day was already building, but the beginning of an adventure is always exciting, so we moved quickly through the first few, flat kilometers.

You know you’re going up there, but at the beginning of hikes like this one, you can’t imagine how.

There were maybe 30-40 people who set out at the same time, so there’s also this natural sorting out of people and paces. The sign says no riding, but of course, I spent most of that first stretch thinking how much faster (and possibly more fun) it’d be to ride.

This is just the preview you get from the first section of the trail to Soda Springs.

Early wind made the air feel cool, but quickly we pulled off jackets and midlayers and began to deal with sweat. We reapplied sunblock. We drank a LOT of water. In fact, they tell you not to start walking unless you’re carrying at least 3 liters of liquid with you. I burned through all of mine, no problem.

We saw plenty of people with maybe not the best shoes and maybe not even close to enough water. Some Belgian guys we found at the shuttle shelter at the very end begged us for just a little bit of water. They’d run out half-way in. I’m guessing it just doesn’t get this hot in Belgium.

Novice hikers might be fooled into thinking they were doing well, because the opening kilometers are pretty chill, but shit gets serious and I saw more than a few people who maybe should have considered alternate entertainment. The moose out front should have told you.
Just in case you missed the last clue, this one should do the trick. She’s not wrong. It was much harder ahead. The next section is also, sometimes called the Devil’s Staircase. Shit is steep.
This is the odd, flat track that leads up to the Red Crater. Scenes from Star Wars or Dune could be filmed here. One more steep pitch to the top.
This is part of the view from the high point of the hike, the Red Crater, which is red from oxidized minerals within the crater itself. That big gash on the right is a lava vent. It’s dramatic. This photo does it nothing like justice. Also from here you can see the Oturere Valley, Rangipo Desert, Kaimanawa Ranges and down towards the Emerald Lakes.
After Red Crater you come to Blue Lake, which is, of course, itself a crater, just one that holds water.
Speaking of the Emerald Lakes. They come next. You think Blue Lake is stunning, until you see these. They’re bright turquoise from a combination of mineral run off from the nearby volcanoes and the melted snow and ice that fill them. There is no filter on this image. This is what they look like. To get down to them you navigate a steep scree field (over my left shoulder) that wants to twist your ankle, rip your shoe off and/or send you flying down into the sand below.
The narrow zig-zag you see in the foreground is the way down, switchback after switchback into the lush green forest to the left. This part seems to go on and on, but the views aren’t bad.
What you can’t see here, behind me as I snap a photo of the sign, is a gaggle of exhausted hikers spread out on a large wooden platform waiting for their shuttle to crunch back into the dusty parking lot and ferry them the 20 minutes back to National Park and some sort of hostel, lodge, hotel or other salvation. We spent 7-and-a-half hours on the trail. You can imagine how badly we needed food and a shower.

What can I tell you that these images don’t? Well, we stayed in National Park, a small enclave just off the main road from Lake Taupo. If we had it to do again, I think we would have driven down the night before and gotten the early shuttle to the trailhead to get more hiking done before the heat really amped up.

We stayed at the Park Hotel Ruapehu and it was pretty perfect. The rooms are small and a bit minimalist but also perfect. A hot shower. A clean bed. And the hotel restaurant was all we could manage after a full day, and it’s a decent meal they make you there. Highly recommended.