Q1: You’ve gone adventuring all over the motu, and we know comparisons are invidious, but what makes the hikes and climbs around Ruapehu so very special?
I’m not a particularly spiritual person but I reckon the mountains of the central North Island have spirits living inside them — the landscape here is alive in a way it simply isn’t in the rest of the country. While writing this book I often got the distinct sense that Ruapehu was letting me in and allowing me to find these treasures — I’d get rare gaps in the weather and stumble across things I’d never dreamed of. I reckon something else has really been at play in the creation of this text.
Q2: You set yourself quite a challenge with this book: to not only research and write about plane crashes, missing people and geological wonders, but also to lace up your boots and get to the sites. How long did doing all this take you?
It took about a year to do 95 per cent of it, then another six months to sort out the final elusive five per cent. I still didn’t do all the trips I had on my list originally — I could’ve written two books, not one. Bear in mind it’s been an absolute obsession for several years now, to the detriment of other things in my life.
Q3: It’s full of brilliant old maps. Do you have a favourite?
That would be like asking someone to name their favourite child! I do have a soft spot for George Allen’s 1894 ‘sketch map’ of Ruapehu, which shows the ‘Skate-Fish Glacier’, a name I’ve never seen on any other maps. He also named other tiny glacier or snow features, such as ‘the Boomerang’, ‘the Y’ and ‘the Worm’ — these are all long lost to climate change now, of course, but their historic existence is recorded thanks to George.
Q4: Speaking of favourites, what’s your favourite offtrack feature of the mountains and why?
There are some stunning, clear, impossibly aqua swimming holes on Ruapehu, on all sides, and if you pick a watercourse and follow it upwards you’re pretty much bound to find one. The water warms up on the hot volcanic rocks, so they’re nowhere near as cold as you’d
think. People come to Ruapehu in the winter and ignore it in the summer, but it’s a whole other playground in the warmer months.
Q5: And favourite place to sit and gaze out at the landscape?
You can’t beat a sunrise coffee from the deck of the Tukino Alpine Sports Club lodge on the eastern side of Ruapehu. Close runners-up on the eastern slopes are Whangaehu Hut and Rangipo Hut.
Q6: Some real characters people these pages. Who stands out for you among them?
Les and Merv Bergersen hid out from the authorities and avoided conscription into the armed services in the Second World War by building and living in huts on the southern side of Ruapehu (not together, but solo, at different times). They lived through floods, snowstorms, droughts and more. A couple of seriously tough cookies.
Q7: Tongariro National Park has historically been billed as a playground for skiers, trampers and holidaymakers but often it’s not for the fainthearted, is it?
The national park has a very real history of people dying in its wilderness, some of whom have never been found. I think people get complacent about it because ‘it’s just a North Island mountain’ — like Taranaki, you can drive quite high on the mountain before you even start to walk, and that height and exposure gets people into trouble. Plenty of people underestimate the Tongariro Alpine Crossing to their peril. Nature will always win.
Q8: What’s the weirdest story you researched?
Goatman is a half-human, half-goat character who roams the Desert Road at night looking for a pickup. Once he’s been in the car for a while he’ll simply disappear, leaving his muddy hoof prints on the passenger footwell as the only sign of your encounter. He’s a kaitiaki, here to protect you from having an accident on the stretch of road where he was thumbing a ride. He lives near Feature Foxtrot on the Desert Road but it’s possible he also has a bach of sorts under the ‘Banana Bridge’ in the Paraparas. Also, Lake Rotopounamu is the water chakra or ‘water vortex’ of the world and you can heal yourself (and others) by walking around it anticlockwise under a Pisces full moon. I swear I am not making any of this up.
Q9: And the saddest?
Two Wellington climbers, Bill Olsen and Tony Morrison, went missing on the east ridge of Ringatoto in early winter 1977, and although Olsen’s body was found the next summer, Morrison is still lost on Ruapehu. Olsen broke his ankle, then died of hypothermia, and I imagine Morrison went down the Wahianoa catchment to get help but died of exposure too. It must be incredibly hard for families to not know where their loved one is. I tried to track their families down, to no avail — if they read this, I’d love them to get in touch, even if only to close the loop.
Q10: Proud of the book?
Not proud, just hopeful: I hope the book is as much fun to read as it was to research and write. I hope people get a sense of the human footprint on these mountains — it’s important for our redress process for te kāhui maunga. And most of all I hope it inspires people to get out and engage with Ruapehu, Tongariro and Ngāuruhoe in person — they are real treasures, and they need to be looked after.
