The original Māori name of Mount Pirongia is ‘Pirongia te aroaro o Kahu’ meaning ‘the fragrant presence of Kahu’. It’s a beautiful name for a mountain that dominates the area around Hamilton. I read in this DOC Information Pack that Kahu was the wife of ‘a tohunga of the Tainui Canoe’. Having recently moved to New Zealand and not being familiar with Māori culture and history, I had to do some research to understand what this meant. A tohunga is an expert practitioner (in various fields) and the canoes were the legendary boats which carried the ancestors of Māori to New Zealand (see Te Ara, Canoe Traditions).
It’s a measure of how geologically young New Zealand is that Pirongia was formed by eruptions only 2.5 million years ago. The highest point is 959m above sea level but the mountain has multiple sub-peaks on the steep forested ridges that radiate from the central summit. There are walking routes up it from all sides. I planned for my first trip to the mountain to approach the summit from the east, climbing up the Tirohanga Track and down the Mahaukura Track.
Mount Pirongia lies about 30 minutes drive to the southwest of Hamilton.
I parked at the end of Grey Road, and followed the Link Track, Ruapane Track and Tirohanga Track up and the Mahaukura Track down.
After some initial easy sections of smooth trail on the Mangakara Nature Walk, the Link Track starts here with a steep climb up wooden steps and tree roots. The orange triangles mark the official trail.
The trail follows the ridge the whole way until you reach the Ruapane Lookout (723m). It is generally obvious although there were a couple of small paths marked with pink plastic arrows that headed off to the right that confused me. Just ignore them.
The Lookout gives a great view of the surrounding area. Mount Karioi (which is beside the town of Raglan) is the mountain in the distance on the left.
However, looking in the other direction shows it’s still a long way to the summit. I was not even halfway in terms of my moving time. The trail now gets more rugged. There are chains on some rocky sections and whilst I did not use them on the way up they would useful when descending, particularly in the wet.
There a point on the ridge where you can scramble up a rocky sub-peak; it’s off the main path but is reasonably obvious. I was hit with a wave of vertigo as I peered down the big cliffs surrounding its other sides. (This photo shows the sub-peak from further up the ridge.)
Some stretches of board-walk, to prevent the trail turning into a quagmire, appear just before the top of Mount Tirohanga. It’s a bit of a mystery to me why the most mud-prone sections of the trail are along tops of the ridges high up on the mountain!
As it’s a stiff climb up to Tirohanga I mistakenly thought I’d reached the summit of Pirongia. Sadly not, but the good news is that the remainder of path to the summit is fast going as there are a lot more board-walks.
This is a photo from the viewing platform on the summit of Pirongia. Kawhia Harbour is in the background with ‘The Cone’, the second highest point on the mountain, being the conical peak on the right of this picture.
This view looks back in the direction I had come from. The Tirohanga Track follows the ridge on the left and my way down (the Mahaukura Track) is along the ridge in the background.
I had seen a helicopter ferrying loads to somewhere beyond the main summit all morning, so I carried on to the Pahautea Hut to see what the heli was up to. I chatted to some workers having lunch at the hut who told me they had been carried up in the heli and would be staying there for a couple of nights to work on trail repairs, a reminder of the effort required to keep the trail in a passable condition.
After the hut I headed back over the summit and down the Mahaukura trail. When putting some tape on my toe on the helipad on the top of Mt Mahaukura – my feet were taking a battering – a guy in army kit, John, appeared out of the bush walking up the trail. He mentioned that he was on his day off and was working in one of the MIQ (managed isolation and quarantine) hotels in Hamilton. It turned out he had also been posted to the Naumi Hotel where Lillian and I had been in MIQ. He said the job was pretty mind-numbing. Since soldiers, albeit unarmed ones and according to John with no special powers to restrain anyone, had been posted at the hotels, the number of guests attempting to go AWOL had dropped to almost zero. I gave him my thanks and we went our separate ways.
The undulations of the ridge continue to Wharauroa peak from where it is mainly downhill for the rest of the trail.
This view shows the ridge I came down from the summit, which is in the middle of the picture. The Mahaukura Track is tougher going than the Tirohanga one; I took more than 20 minutes to cover a single kilometre in places. The up and downs over a web of steep exposed tree roots seemed almost endless. It was sweaty jungle bashing without the tropical creepy crawlies, snakes and leeches.
I also saw some strange droppings on this peak which had me confused as to their origin until I looked closely.
There was a final chain – not as steep as it looks in the photo – descending Wharauroa, after which the trail becomes progressively less arduous as the angle eases. I was even able to run a portion of it which made a nice change.
By the time I reached my car, four and three-quarter hours after setting out, I was drained. My legs had started hurting from descending even before I started the Mahaukura Track, due to the numerous descents on the ridge climbing the mountain! For three days afterwards I could only hobble around. I was in a similar state to the one Lillian was in after we had walked the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. I received the same amount of sympathy from Lillian as I had given her… practically none!
During the walk/run I drank just over 2.5 litres of water and ate a hunk of Christmas cake, a couple of cereal bars and a sandwich. It was a hot mid-week day in early January. There were a fair number of people on the mountain. In addition to John and the trail workers, I saw about ten more walkers.
Timings
Based on Strava, the loop was 16.4km long with 1236m of cumulative ascent. I moved as quickly as I could, but the only places where I could run were towards the end of the descent, on the initial Nature Trail and on the board-walks near the summit. My moving time to key points was as follows:
Ruaphane Lookout: 55 mins.
Mount Pirongia (on the way to the Pahaueta Hut): 2 hours.
Mount Pirongia (on the way back from the Pahaueta Hut): 2 hours, 23 mins.
Carpark: 4 hours, 23 minutes.
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