{"id":14414,"date":"2024-04-11T23:49:09","date_gmt":"2024-04-12T06:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/?p=14414"},"modified":"2024-04-12T01:04:11","modified_gmt":"2024-04-12T08:04:11","slug":"invisible-volcanoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/2024\/04\/11\/invisible-volcanoes\/","title":{"rendered":"Invisible Volcanoes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As expected it rained all night and all day, and despite spending two hours driving the circumference of Egmont National Park, including driving up to two of the visitor centers, I still haven’t seen any of the 8,261 foot tall Mount Taranaki. Were it not for the fact that there’s a massive mountain on the map I would easily believe that there’s nothing but farmland and rolling hills in this area, but rumors persist that one of the world’s most picturesque volcanoes is hiding in the clouds just a few miles away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I expected a few storms on the trip, and while it’s a bummer to miss out on the Pouakai Crossing<\/a>, it was a roll of the dice spending only a day here to try to traverse it; six weeks seems like a long time for a visit to New Zealand, but it’s a laughably insufficient amount of time when you want to see everything<\/em>. After leaving Egmont National Park I’ve planned for three nights near Tongariro National Park for the Tongariro Alpine Crossing<\/a> since that’s the hike I most want to do, so with luck the weather will clear and I’ll get a chance to do arguably New Zealand’s most scenic day-hike without the need for a wetsuit and sonar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As three inches or so of rain have fallen over the past 24 hours, causing Mount Taranaki to go missing, I was reminded of a story that John Rhys-Davies (Gimli) told about filming during the Lord of the Rings. They were near Queenstown shooting some lake scenes when a huge storm came in, roads were cut off due to landslides, and he had to use a stepladder to get into his hotel room through a window due to flooding. In the midst of this storm, the production coordinator made the rare call to cancel shooting, stating that \u201cwe cannot shoot tomorrow because the lake is underwater.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Egmont<\/p>\n

The boundaries of Egmont National Park were set at a six mile radius from the peak, and the forest has been cleared for farming right up to the park borders, so entering the park is like driving through a wall of rainforest. Photo credit: NASA<\/a>.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As expected it rained all night and all day, and despite spending two hours driving the circumference of Egmont National Park, including driving up to two of the visitor centers, I still haven’t seen any of the 8,261 foot tall Mount Taranaki. Were it not for the fact that there’s a massive mountain on the … Continue reading “Invisible Volcanoes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[76,77],"class_list":["post-14414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-2024-walkabout","tag-new-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14414"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14440,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14414\/revisions\/14440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}