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It really seems that we can't do any adventure sports/adventures without getting rained on. Milford Track - rained. Rain, rain and more rain. There is a very famous tramp through the North Island called the Tongariro Crossing. This crossing takes you up and over through a massive volcano park. These volcanos are used as the volcanos for Mt. Doom from Lord of the Rings and are just as impressive in person.
The crossing can be done in one 8 hour day. But we had planned to hike Mt. Ngauruhoe (2291m) and Mt. Tongariro (1978m) and both active volcanoes. The most recent volcano activity on the Tongariro range was in 1996, fairly recently. However, we did not get to see any flowing lava. So, we planned to go off the Crossing and spend a night in a Department of Conservation hut, allowing us far more time to scale these volcanoes.
We were picked up from our campsite at 7:20am and headed off to the base of the track. Packing as little as possible to allow for good time and ease on the massive Devil's Staircase (which I sadly do not have a picture of). We woke up to clear blue skies. We tramped through a monsoon. Starting off our tramp as clouds gathered up ahead and continuing up the increasing slope until the clouds were no longer gathering up ahead, they were massing about our heads and looking increasingly menacing. But rain has not stopped us before, why let it now? As we progressed along the increasingly difficult slope (and increasing rain), I started to get a little nervous. The Devil's Staircase is appropriately named. It is long, steep, and grueling and the conditions did not help the situation. As we got higher and higher the rain got worse, but the rain had nothing on the wind.
Crossing over the top of the Devil's Staircase found us on a plateau. But we also found many people turning around, unable to complete the crossing in the gusting winds and pounding rain. We reached the top and discussed this option and decided to push on (are you really surprised?). The logic being that the gusting winds would be in our face instead of at our back and that alone would cause serious trouble going back down the Staircase. So we pushed onto the base of Mt. Ngauruhoe. This volcano is climbable to the crater on the summit, 1.5 hours up, 0.5 hours down (it's that steep). Again we huddled up to reevaluate our plans. We decided that going up the volcano in the monsoon rain and galeforce winds would have been stupid (see mom, we still have some common sense). So we passed on this and headed onto the Western Ridge. This is a ridge that is totally exposed to the elements. I don't think that I've ever had to dig so hard to accomplish something. Each step needed an extreme amount of concentration not to slip on the volcanic soil and to avoid being swept off the mountain by the winds. I'm not joking about this, there were times that my pack acted like a sail and I had to anchor myself in order to stop from being blown off the mountain, literally. We made it safely to the top and over the volcano and into the shelter of the peaks.
We were freezing and soaked. The clouds were still in around us and we tramped off to find our hut for the night. Pushing hard along the track to get into shelter and heat quicker. We had to descend into a volcanic valley along what I'm going to term, the Spine of the World, leading us down the valley into a volcanic desert. Very eerie, almost devoid of vegetation and not a sound to be heard except the wind gusting through us. We made it to the hut in amazing time, simply because we were pushing so hard due to the conditions.
Dried out and happy we awoke for sunrise over Mordor (see picture), which was spectacular. The sunrise lit up Mt. Ngauruhoe and Mt. Ruapehu (both used as Mt. Doom from Lord of the Rings) and were unbelievable. The weather held for the rest of the day and we had pure sunshine to climb back up the volcanoes and see what we couldn't see the day before. And all the way back down the track to Ketatahi.
previous travel blog entry
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