Up the side of a volcano

16-17 March 2019
Party: Mark, Spike, Me
Whakapapa Skifield, Tongariro National Park
 
As part of my volunteer role with the club ski lodge, I urgently needed to do a detailed stock take of the dry food stores in the pantry in time to sort out the bulk food delivery for mid-May. So, despite the barely-recovered jetlag from the previous weekends trip to Melbourne, we loaded up the car and drudged our way north on a Friday afternoon.
To help keep spirits up, we tried starting with a walk via the river to Taranaki Falls in the morning. This was a complete failure as Spike just did not want to walk anywhere. We headed back to the lodge and promised we'd try going out again after I'd finished the stock take instead.

Thankfully, the stocktake didn’t take long and the weather was pretty reasonable. So once I had the bulk of the stocktake completed, and after we had spent some time admiring the work of the helicopter that was dropping off roofing iron on the neighbouring lodge, we headed off to explore.

We started at the carpark at the Top of the Bruce, where we had the first opportunity to see the construction of the base station for the new gondola. The massive red crane that was in place was impressive to everyone. The carpark area was busy – it appeared we had stumbled upon a work party weekend for multiple other lodges – with cars, people, and loads of stuff hanging around in piles.

After watching a large tractor with a trailer head through the cordon and start making its way up the Rock Garden, we wandered off to the large map that told us how we could still access the upper sections of the mountain. Normally at this time of year, such a walk would literally go straight up the graded track from behind the café, and continue up to Knoll Ridge. This summer, the track instead was a series of poled plot points, winding its way up and over the rocks to the side of the ski field.

Astoundingly, Spike was excited about climbing over rocks and hunting out the next flagged pole for us to walk to. We meandered our way over the rocks and up the hill for a while, making it up and around the Tongariro Ski Club lodge, then up and across a waterfall that marks the exit of the Tennants Valley Run. In the end, we made it to well within sight of the Tararua Tramping Club lodge before we persuaded Spike that it was time to head back down to the our lodge for a drink and some afternoon tea.

We largely returned the same way, although instead of dropping back down to the carpark then climbing back up our track, we scrambled over and around another couple of lodges and dropped onto the old 4WD track that runs along our ridge (which comes out down by Carpark 5).

Since the weather was fine on Sunday morning, we repeated our escapade. This time we started by going up the 4WD track for a short distance, before rock hopping our way back up to the waterfall again. Now that we knew where we were going, this took a chunk less time than it did on Saturday.

Returning via a non-route through a gully that is popular for sledding in the winter, we picked up an ice cream container that had been dropped, and filled it with rubbish we found alongside the stream. We stopped in at the rubbish depot to drop this off before returning to the lodge to lock up and head home.