Dirt 4 Life

Walking on Volcanos

Tongariro Alpine Crossing

 This is a shuttle hike and the shuttle leaves at 5:40 to beat the crowds. The night before was crazy cold so we froze all night to wake up super early we managed to make the bus on time as others were scrambling and running after the bus this was quite amusing for us. It felt like the amazing race where the late people were not going to be allowed on the bus because they were the last teams to arrive. I don’t even watch this show.

 The early shuttle bus was to beat the crowds you can imagine the crowds at 6am yeah almost nobody except the 10 of us on the bus.

 The Tongariro Alpine Crossing is one of New Zealand’s 9 great walks and is about 20kms long. Someone along the way had said it was a pretty hard crossing – not so much. It was all alpine which was great and we climbed up for about 1.5 hours and then attempted the hike up a volcano. The Volcano didn’t look that hard from below and we read the directions to the unmarked trail it said follow the white stakes and then follow the ridge well we followed the stakes until we could see a trail up the scree which was apparently the wrong way to go as it wasn’t the ridge. This seems to be where we went wrong we didn’t follow the ridge. So our summit attempt was ended by a wrong turn and we found ourselves headed straight up a scree slope with nowhere to go. So we would have to call off our summit attempt today and carry on back along the crossing.

 Craters and thermal activity were along the way and very amazing to look at; steam rose from the rocks as I put my hands down on the rocks to warm them up. The wind was howling through but it was a super nice day the best day they have had in the last 8 weeks. It had snowed the day before so we were pretty happy with our day,

 The way down was a great run of about 8km the trail was a mixture of rocks, stairs, streams and a few people. There were some hot springs on the way down but we weren’t allowed in them with out prior permission from the Natives but we did feel the water in the stream and it was warm that was a little bizarre. Near the end of the hike there was an amazing waterfall so we stopped for a while to get the best picture.  Finished the hike in 5 hours and made it back for the first shuttle at 12:30pm I guess starting the trail that early leaves you the rest of the day to do some more hiking. It was a great hike and it reminded us of the Skyline trail in Jasper.

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