Tama Lakes - Tongariro National Park — Nick Crarer Photography

I received a message early in the week from Instagram friend, Geoffrey Nelson, “Planning on headed back up to Ruapehu before the snow clears at all mate?”. I had met Geoff fleetingly a while back when we bumped into each other shooting sunset one evening in Wellington. He’s an inspirational bloke working hard in the gym and a keen photographer like me. The trip relied on the weather playing nice and finding suitable accommodation nearby to the start of the walk. Come Friday both those boxes were ticked and after amping each other up all week we took off on Saturday morning for the mountains.

The weather forecast was looking marginal for sunset on Saturday but superb for Sunday morning’s sunrise. We took a punt and on Saturday started the walk towards Tama Lakes. It rained on us throughout the first half of the walk but it was nothing heavy and it looked like it was going to clear…and clear it did. The photos below start about an hour into the walk once the rain subsided.

We made good time along the well maintained track with just a couple of creek crossings to slow us down a little and by golden hour we had reached Lower Tama Lake. The views are just so spectacular it’s hard to move on but we made the small ascent up the scree slope towards upper Tama Lake before sunset. Unfortunately Ngauruhoe had a decent layer of cloud that never rose but Ruapehu was clear so that at least narrowed our options. It may have been too hard to decide which to photograph had both options been available to us. The light was perfect but sunset came and went without a fuss and without the vibrant and colourful clouds we were optimistic in seeing.

We donned our head torches and made our way back to the carpark in the dark, still buzzing off of what was a great little trip. The walk back felt twice as long as the walk in and our legs grew weary leading us to the decision of not repeating the same walk for sunrise. This would have meant a 3am departure time from the motel in National Park which suddenly became the least appealing thing we could imagine.

We were in bed by 10am and I was asleep shortly after. At 4:40am on Sunday my alarm sounded and we were out of bed, packing our gear and off again to shoot somewhere a bit easier on our legs. We traveled north towards Turangi then swung back around south to head down the Desert Road to shoot Ngauruhoe. The weather forecast was for the area to perfectly clear from 2am but it was wrong (which happens often around mountains) and the clouds would have been too low for our original plans to shoot sunrise from the same spot as the night before. Shooting from the Desert Road turned out to be a great decision and that was the weekend done. A sandwich and an energy drink later we were back in Wellington, trip done and dusted.

Details

Origin: Wellington

Destination: Ngauruhoe Place, Whakapapa Village (start of walk)

Travel time: 4 hours 6 minutes

Sunset: 6:10pm - Sunrise: 6:05am

Walking track: Tama Lakes Track

Track distance: 17km return (2 hours each way at a steady pace with 8kg backpack)

Track info: Few people heading back as we went out for sunset and not a soul around once we got there.