snapshots abroad: New Zealand - Tongariro National Park

Every vacation has that day where things don't exactly go according to plan. This was one of those. I don't want to dwell too much here but I was really hoping that after the north island was hammered by rain and wind for pretty much the last month we'd be able to catch a break. Sadly, our luck with the weather ran out. We were set for the 19.4 km Tongariro Alpine Crossing trail, the most popular day hike in New Zealand. In a land where hiking is the national pastime that's quite a label. Highlights include walking the rim of a volcanic crater and passing crater lakes while taking in the views of several mountains, including Mt. Ngauruhoe, a still-active volcano (and also cast as Mt. Doom in the LOTR films).

But, when we checked into our hostel last night the forecast was grim and did not improve by morning. The clouds were moving at a superb rate and the Red Crater portion of the trail was supposed to have 65 KPH gusts which is really dangerous because it is the narrowest and most dangerous portion of the track. By 7:30 am Hans and I reluctantly decided to bail on the idea of doing the crossing trail. We could have used tomorrow as an alternate day but the wind forecast is even worse: 80 KPH winds! We've been in high wind conditions before (see Scotland) but that was on a very wide plateau and we actually turned around at the summit rather than continue down on the sketchy bits in windy conditions. You don't want to mess around.

Instead, Hans picked out the 6 km park loop trail that goes by Taranaki Falls (20 meters, or 66 feet). It was a very invigorating walk because we experienced wind, rain, sleet, and snow and very nearly some sunshine. The park is at 1000 meters elevation and the Alpine Crossing trail goes up to 1800. As we were hiking this morning we could see snow not very far above our line of visibility (which was under some very low clouds). In other words, we did not come prepared for an ice/snow hike and in order to do the alpine crossing we would have had to rent crampons. The winds made it extra dangerous. So even though I'm sad that we didn't get to do the hike we wanted on this trip, I'm not sad that we didn't do it today. The weather just wasn't going to allow it. Did I mention that because of the snow the weather service also said that the avalanche risk was "considerable"?

After our short hike we drove around the area and had a nice lunch outside of the Lake Taupo area. As the afternoon wore into early evening we saw some blue sky openings but that still wouldn't have helped us today because the Alpine Crossing takes an average of 7 hours and we were told that you want to be off the mountains by 5 pm no matter what because of the way the weather is out here.

OK, enough lamenting. Here are some awesome photos from the day!