Mt Taranaki

As long as I have been in New Zealand I have wanted to climb the North Islands two highest peaks, Mt Taranaki and Mt Ruapehu. Up until recently it has been all talk and no action, so my New Year’s resolution was to have a crack at both of them.

We are now into autumn and before long the mountains will be covered in snow and out of bounds until next summer, so time was of the essence. The forecast for the coming weekend was good, and I had run out of excuses, so I decided it was time to give Mt Taranaki a try.

After much arm-twisting, and at rather short notice I managed to convince my friend Simon that he really did want to subject himself to the murderous slog needed to climb to the summit. Not wanting to suffer alone, Simon also roped in a couple of his friends, namely Bruce and Kevin.

The plan was to travel to the Dawson Falls (900m) road-end and from there walk up to Fanthams Peak where we planned to spend the night at Syme Hut (1966m), before climbing to the summit (2518m) the next day.

The weather on the 5hr drive up to Dawson Falls was glorious, with hardly a cloud in the sky all the up from Wellington, but was otherwise, uneventful enough.

We arrived at the road-end early afternoon and wasted no time setting off on what we thought was the track to the Syme Hut. Turns out we should have maybe taken a bit more time, as we had somehow got onto the wrong track, despite there being a dirty great sign pointing us in the right direction. We only wasted half an hour or so, but it was a rather inauspicious start.

Mt Taranaki taken from the Dawson Falls roadend

The proper track started off relatively gently, and for the first half hour or so passed through some really lovely bush; real Lord of the Rings stuff. From this point the vegetation started thinning out, and we eventually found ourselves out in the open above the bush line. The bush line in New Zealand is relatively low at around 1200m and I always find it fascinating to watch how rapidly the flora changes, when climbing up onto the tops.

This one was taken near the start of the walk

At this point the track became much steeper and we ascended up a long staircase before eventually arriving at the base of a steep scoria slope, which led up to Fanthams Peak, and our hut for the night. As well as being steep, the scoria was very loose, which made the going rather difficult. It really was a case of a case of two steps forward and one step back, and that was when I wasn’t actually falling over or dodging the, at times, rather sizeable rocks, that the person above had kindly dislodged. After an hour or so we reached the top of the slope and from here to the hut the going was much easier.

Syme Hut was a welcome sight and we immediately set up home there and got the obligatory brew up going. We shared the hut with just one other person; a young guy, who, like us intended to climb the summit the next day. He however didn’t hold out that much hope as he had heard from another tramper that the snow that had fallen on the summit a few days previously, had frozen and turned to sheet ice. This didn’t bode too well as we had no ice axe’s or crampons, but what the hell, we had come all this way, and were going to give it our best shot.

Syme Hut.

I took some nice pictures of the sunset, but didn’t linger to long as it soon got pretty cold. After that, all that remained was to cook up the evening meal (spaghetti and stew), have another brew up and go to bed.

Sunset at Kyme Hut.

We woke up to a lovely, still, clear day.

We set off relatively late in the morning in the hope that the snow higher up would have had a chance to soften up a bit. From the hut the ground drops away a little, before coming to the base of yet another steep scoria slope which leads right up to the summit. I was really dreading this bit, as it looked even steeper than the previous days scoria slope that I had found so difficult and tiring. It was indeed hard work, but overall was a lot easier going than I expected. As we climbed higher we started encountering patches of icy snow. These were easy to avoid at first, but gradually there was less scoria and more ice, until we reached a point around 100m below the summit, where the ice was pretty well continuous. It was at this point that we unanimously decided to call it quits - we had given it a real good go, but it wasn’t worth risking life and limb for.

The scoria slope leading up to the summit.

As we got closer to the top we encoutered more and more snow and ice.

This was just about as far as I got.

In any case, whilst we had been climbing up, the cloud had started to roll in and had covered the summit, so we wouldn’t have got a view anyway.

The cloud had really reduced the visibility, and as the upper part of the route is not marked, it was time to beat a hasty retreat back down the mountain.

This one was taken on the way back down again as we got down to the bush line.

By the time we got back to the roadend my legs ached like hell, but it was a small price to pay, for what turned out to be a very nice trip. Thanks also to Simon, Bruce and Kevin for being such good company.