Volcanic Plateau - Day 1

I had pitched to Gary, Darrel (who took the majority of the images below) and Steve the idea of doing the 42 Traverse before the road closes to 4X4 vehicles for the season.  However on closer inspection it was made clear to me that if I valued my paint, which at this point I do, then I should not do the traverse.  So having already booked the hotel rooms we ended up being a weekend in search of some tracks!  I hit the books, hit the maps and started asking around.  What I quickly learned was that there are a treasure trove of tracks for off roading, but you need to know who to ask!

Short of time we put together a list of 5 tracks that we thought would be worth exploring and headed off to Rotorua.  We had breakfast the following day in Taupo at the pub.  Food was great!

 

Who's Logo Lies Beneath?

 and set off for our first track, well road really as it turned out, maps are misleading things.

The first track was Mangatepopo Road on the western flanks of Tongariro, one of three active volcanoes on the central plateau.  Conclusion, dusty, easy, dull.  It is simply a jumping off point for the Tongariro Crossing track and was full of cars parked up.  But we had fun anyway.

 After this we set off for Raetihi and a road that led to upper Ruatiti.  We had spotted a vehicle track that implied there was a link back to another road.  So we barreled on up this windy gravel road, through some epic bush and river scenery to the end of the road.  In fact we got to the homestead of the station.  So we enquired at the homestead if we could go on the track through to Erua Road?  We were told that it was a cart track back in the day, but they consider it to be a "paper track." We would be lucky to get a horse or a quad through there now.  I was left with the distinct impression that if we were more local, the track would have been a go.  So we turned around and re-traced our steps.

 

However, our trip was not in vain.  At the bridge at Ruatiti, Darrel spotted some birds in the river I had a feeling that they may be Whio (Blue Duck) a very rare duck indeed, there are only 2500 left in the world.  They have very specific requirements for their habitat.  They need to live in fast flowing, rocky rivers that are clean and have steep sided banks or canyons around them.  Add to this that they live in small family groups and are territorial and you start to understand their plight. At this location we saw 4 Whio so I got out my big lens and went in search of these birds and spent a happy 20 minutes or so capturing the following images:

You can see more of my bird images on my flickr photostream. 

By this time it was already well past mid-day and we had more to do.  So we set off for the Tukino Ski field on the Eastern flank of Ruapehu another of the active volcanoes in the region.  We opted not to mess about in the river beds at Tangiwai, not really wanting to tempt fate!

The Tukino Ski Field Access Road shows up on the Topo50 maps as another vehicle track similar to the one we wanted to explore linking to Erua Road.  This track was really an off road track and promised to be great fun.  Again really it was a rough road and not an offroad track.  We went as far as we could but came up against a locked gate, with a phone number on it.  We called the number and were told that if we had called earlier in the week we would have been given the key and could have progressed to the Tukino village.  Again, this is an example of local knowledge.  There was nothing on the Tukino Ski Field site to indicate that there is a gate, why would there be?  In the winter the gate is open!  We had a little excitement up there though as Gary got stuck in the scoria as he executed a three point turn, so I had to tow him out.

Next on our list was Clements Mill Road, this road is listed on the second edition of the North Island  4WD tracks book that we had.  So we had to explore it.  It took us through some fantastic native bush that Steve was pretty sure is pre-colonial, in other words it has not suffered from any logging.  But with a name like Clements Mill, I suspect that we were looking at second growth timber.  Whatever the past has wrought on this forest, what we saw was epic.  However the road was far from epic.  We pushed into some promising side tracks only to discover that we stumbled upon locations where people were living off grid.  Not quite time to get out the Banjos, that joy would have to wait until the next day.

We stopped to talk to some local hunters who suddenly appeared out of the bush, this became a bit of a regular thing too, more of which later.  They suggested that we try the quarry track, which we did and it was entertaining, but again not challenging.  As we set off back to Rotorua and a well earned feed and rest we were entertained by a spectacular sunset which I stopped off to photograph before pressing on.  We finally got back to Rotorua at 8:30 having spent thirteen and half hours on the road!

 I took my Go Pro cameras with me for the trip, but the batteries have been playing up, I think I either need the extended life battery kit or some new batteries as they did not last long in the car and took ages to charge up.  Never the less I did manage to get some footage of the day.  So enjoy!

RuapehuWeekend from David Kinane on Vimeo.