Te Araroa Side Quest: Taranaki Around the Mountain Circuit

The thing about volcanoes is that if you’re not used to having them around, they’re really hard to ignore. I had a week to wait until Rob and Ellyse caught up with me on the trail, so I decided to take the bus over to the west coast of the North Island to explore Taranaki, the volcano I’d been gazing at on the horizon.

If, like me, you’re used to your local mountains being hundreds of millions of years old, it can be a bit shocking to learn how quickly volcanoes are formed, and how young some of them are. Taranaki is the newest in a series of volcanoes that have emerged in the region over the last 20 million years or so – but the crazy thing is how quickly each of these peaks has either collapsed or eroded, forming a chain of jagged lumps and crags that march in a straight line northwest out to the Tasman Sea. Taranaki itself was first formed in eruptions about 125,000 years ago, but its cone has collapsed at least once since then and then been rebuilt with the detritus of later explosions. The current cone is about 4000 years old – which is NOT OLD in my book – and, since I know you’re wondering, it last erupted in 1755. At present, it’s considered dormant – but I’m guessing there are official volcano-minders somewhere keeping an eye on it just in case.

Taranaki and the Stony River

There are a number of hiking trails in Taranaki / Mt. Egmont National Park, but I decided to follow the Around the Mountain circuit, which is essentially a 4-day loop with options to follow either a high or a low route and with access to a spur track up to the summit. A funny thing about the national park is that it’s nearly a perfect circle, owing to a decision back in the 1880s to create a forest reserve within a 10-kilometer radius of the summit. So now the volcano and its park look like an island marooned in a vast patchwork ocean of dairy farms and sheep ranches stretching across the plain.

As I learned over the course of my hike, some of the trails in the park are heavily used and, perhaps consequently, well-maintained (or maybe the cause-effect relationship is the other way around, but at any rate, what I’m trying to say is that there are parts of the park with other hikers and good trails). Aaaand… there are places where it looks like DOC has bowed out and is letting nature take its course, and everyone who knows what it’s like in there is staying far far away. By which I mean that I spent one day skipping down a spectacularly constructed trail, complete with steps, bridges, and boardwalks, and then two more days bush-bashing across ravines and crawling over massive treefalls, and then one more day of the steps and the ladders and such. More about the ladders in a minute.

But first – this mountain gets an unbelievable amount of rain. Like, over 6 feet of rainfall a year. All falling on steep slopes made largely of loose debris. So there’s a pretty impressive amount of erosion, and you can see that the land is just getting cleaved away chunk by chunk every year. Little trickles near the peak become forceful rivers as they descend, carving away ravines and depositing debris in rocky outfalls that shift and move as currents change. I really can’t imagine how difficult it must be to maintain this kind of a landscape for human visitors, and I imagine DOC must have some kind of triage system whereby factors such as “earth being eagerly consumed by ravenous forces” and “nobody seems too keen to go back here anyway” are plotted on an official rubric, prompting a management strategy best described as “stand back and let the mountain eat itself.”

Bells Falls

All of which meant that on my days of bush-bashing around the back of Taranaki, I had the place to myself. The best night came after a day of sliding down gullies, climbing cliffs of gnarled roots, and circumnavigating enormous fallen trees blanketed in vines, to emerge finally at Lake Dive, a little lake nestled at about 3000 feet, just below the steep upper slopes of the mountain. There used to be a hut here but it burned down in 2020 and hasn’t been rebuilt, so I’m guessing not many people make the journey. Incidentally, I’ve learned that huts burn down if not frequently then at least occasionally – wood stoves, gas cookers, and candlelight all making for uneasy companions in these tin and timber shacks. So it was just me, a patch of charred earth, and an amazing view of the volcano’s peak across the lake.

View of Taranaki across Lake Dive

Ah, right – back to the ladders. Imagine, if you will, a nearly trackless forest, looped about with vines and moss-shaggy trees, sudden swamps and cliffs of mud. Imagine battering your way through this place and then coming to a 30-foot-tall metal ladder bolted to the side of a chasm down which you must climb. Imagine thinking, “Yes! This is gonna be so much easier to get down than that 50-foot chasm I had to slide down on my ass a mile ago!” Then imagine wondering, upon reflection, who gets to decide which chasms are outfitted with metal ladders and which are fated to be polished by the asses of hapless people sliding down them. Every time I came to one of these ladders I was filled with an inexplicable glee – it felt like finding the remains of an alien spacecraft in the jungle somewhere. Behold: someone once thought it was worth spending a bunch of money and effort to help people climb up this cliff in the middle of the woods! THANK YOU, annual budgets of the long-ago past!