Can Mt Taranaki can live up to its perfect form?

By COLIN MOORE

Ask a child to paint a picture of a mountain and you can be almost certain the drawing will bear a striking resemblance to Mt Taranaki.

The near-perfect andesite volcano rising alone, 2518m out of a plain of greenest farmland, is a dreamer's mountain.

Maori explain its isolation with a tale of a clash by rival suitors for the love of Mt Pihanga that stands behind Turangi. Taranaki lost and was kicked out of the Central North Island volcanic region by the victor, Tongariro, carving out the Whanganui River as it fled west.

But for being blocked by the Pouakai Ranges, Taranaki would have vanished into the sea in its despair.

Instead it has stood magnificently, and quietly, for the past 225 years, overlooking bloody inter-tribal clashes among Maori and rapacious land grabbing by Pakeha.

Its heights were tapu to Maori and revered by Pakeha. In 1881 all land within 9.6km of the summit became protected and 100 years ago this Friday the cone and its ring of alpine scrubland and thick forest became Egmont National Park, the second-oldest in New Zealand.

Taranaki, named Mt Egmont by Captain James Cook and still fiercely called that by some diehard provincials, is replete with paradox.

If it's a dreamer's mountain it should be a mountaineer's dream. Since naturalist Ernst Dieffenbach first stood on its summit in December, 1939, many top mountaineers have sharpened their crampons on the snow and ice of Mt Taranaki. Yet while more people have scaled its apparently straightforward slopes than have climbed any other mountain in the country, it has also claimed more lives.

From the distance Taranaki seems to have been finished by a skilled plasterer. Yet up close it has been scored by ravine, rivulet, landslide and avalanche.

And its green ring plain varies from dense and damp goblin forest to barren alpine tussock. In short, the picture postcard Mt Taranaki and the national park that encompasses it, is a fairly comprehensive book of the New Zealand outdoors.

In no other mountain region is it quite so easy to get both dust and snow on your boots than it is in Egmont National Park, which, says veteran mountain guide Chris Prudden, is Mt Taranaki's major problem.

At just 30km from New Plymouth, it's too damn accessible.

It took Dieffenbach several days to make his way through the bush to the snowline before tackling the summit. Modern adventurers can surf on the famed Taranaki coast in the morning and be in place for a summit bid in the afternoon.

And that ease of access can be a trap for the unwary and the ill-prepared because there is nothing between the mountain, standing proudly isolated on the Taranaki Bight, and Australia but a vast expanse of sea across which weather changes surge rapidly and viciously.

Prudden gets annoyed by those who treat Taranaki lightly and thus cause its reputation for taking lives.

"This mountain is no more dangerous than any other," he insists when I meet him at the historic Camphouse at the end of the North Egmont access road.

"People get caught out because the mountain is so easy to get to," he says. "They think they can just stroll to the summit."

Prudden, who has been guiding on Mt Taranaki since 1986, has stood on the summit about 1300 times but like most good mountain guides, he considers the journey to be more important than the final destination. It's a point he tries to make to clients intent on bagging the summit when perhaps neither they, nor the conditions, are up to it.

"There are so many fantastic walks and interesting features in this park that it is a mistake to just be obsessed by the summit."

It is an opinion with which I happily concur, particularly as the moody mountain is in the grip of capricious weather. It's sunny in the carpark outside the lavishly upgraded North Egmont visitor centre but Prudden casts an experienced eye over the clouds starting to wisp at the summit and gauges that long before we could get there the weather would have turned dangerously for the worse.

So I lighten my pack of climbing equipment and overnight gear and follow Prudden on plan B, a do-able journey to show some of the features of the 33,543ha park.

It is easy tramping up a rough vehicle access road towards Tahurangi Lodge, at least until you get to the aptly named steep section, the Puffer. The access services a television transmitter and Prudden tells the tale of being sent to escort a technician off the mountain who had been caught in a sudden storm and marooned inside the transmitter building for several days.

When the mountaineer got to the road end he noticed something red in the snow beneath his boot. It was the roof of the technician's van.

Tahurangi Lodge is owned by the New Plymouth-based Taranaki Alpine Club. It is warm and comfortable inside when we stop for a cuppa. Enjoying the mod cons and the escape from the Olympic Games television hysteria, are a group of experienced Auckland climbers.

They had set out for the summit that morning but turned back at 2000m in the rising wind that my guide predicted.

The wind is buffeting as we traverse part of the three-to-five-day walk around the mountain towards Warwick Castle, one of many stark ridges and faces of clean basalt on the mountain. The pitches should entice rock climbers more than they do but Prudden suggests that sport climbers don't like having to walk for a couple of hours to get to the foot of a climb.

That's good because there is no one to snigger at my scrambling at the end of Prudden's belay up and down the Castle turrets, nor my choice, in the interests of rusty technique, to be lowered from the top rather than abseil.

Prudden duly says nice things about my efforts as we head back down the mountain with the wind mostly at our backs and mighty glad to have settled for a lesser summit.

That night I rattle around inside the cavernous 32-bunk Camphouse on my own. Built in the 1860s as an Army barracks in New Plymouth and sledged to North Egmont in 1891, it is the oldest building in any New Zealand national park.

The Department of Conservation's modern, 38-bunk Konini Lodge, is at East Egmont, where the visitor centre has also been upgraded as part of a $2 million makeover of the park's visitor centres.

But I stay in the comfort of the Swiss-styled Dawson Falls Mountain Lodge. It is my intention to follow the around-the-mountain-track to the top of the third sealed road that gives access high on Mt Taranaki but Prudden's storm warning is now in full force with driving rain turning to sleet.

By mid-afternoon a four-wheel-drive vehicle is needed to get to the Mountain House Motor Lodge at the top of the road and next morning there is nearly a metre of snow outside.

The sun is also shining and a mob of holidaying schoolchildren are at the bottom of the mountain waiting for the road to be cleared so they can turn some dreams into play.

Casenotes

ACCOMMODATION: Dawson Falls Mountain Lodge, Dawson Falls, ph (06) 765 5457, 0800 651 800; double suites from $90 a night. Mountain House Motor Lodge, Pembroke Rd, ph (06) 765 6100. Bunkhouse: Camphouse, North Egmont, sleeps 32, $15 a night, ph (06) 756 0990; Konini Lodge, Dawson Falls, sleeps 38, $15 a night, ph 025 430 248. Mountain huts: Maketawa, Waingongoro, Lake Dive, Waiaua Gorge, Kahui, Holly, from $10 an adult, contact Department of Conservation, ph (06) 765 5144.

GUIDES: Mountain Guides, Mt Egmont, contact Chris Prudden, ph 025 474 510, (06) 758 8261, e-mail mguide@voyager.co.nz