I met up with my mom and Dahlia to head off on a jaunt to Mt. Egmont National Park, more commonly known as Mt. Taranaki, on the western peninsula of the North Island. Our main aim here, not surprisingly, was to hike up the mountain as best we could! The mountain is 2500m/8200ft, 1600m/5500ft of which you walk over the course of only 6k/4mi (look at me and my conversions). Unfortunately it’s a little too snowy this early in the summer to make it to the summit without crampons so we decided we’d just go as far as we could to enjoy the views. Unfortunately, again, we were not blessed with good weather, but we trudged up anyway hoping for a break later in the day.
And let me tell you, this is one steep hike. The first hour was up a gravel road until it transitioned into a cement track referred to as “the puffer” – luckily this provided me enough amusement to make it to the hut that acted as our lunch spot. From there we scrambled over rocks before climbing up an estimated 1000 stairs. If all of this hadn’t been bad enough, the rest of the way to the summit was even steeper and involved two hours scrambling up an incredibly steep scree slope and trying not to slip. We’d been waiting out the weather all day and it wasn’t really getting any better so at this point we decided it wasn’t worth continuing if we weren’t going to get to see anything so we started to head back down, probably at about 1800m or 60% of the way to the top.
The puffer
The beginning of the infinite stairs
Annoying scree
So steep!
Sad to be turning back
Of course half an hour after we turned around a lot of the clouds cleared away so we soaked in the views and took plenty of pictures. The upper mountain was still pretty cloudy so this was our consolation for not being higher up when the weather broke. After that we enjoyed some snow sliding and then made our way down. The best part of this trip was the assurance we all got that, given the right season and weather, we could totally climb this mountain. Taranaki, I’ll be back for you someday!
Climbers coming down
Only real view of the whole mountain
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