The Pinnacles

The first chapter of our road trip has come to an end, but there is so much more to explore! Luckily for you all, I'm in a sharing mood, so I will now indulge your curiosity without even making you beg!  As we left the Northlands and entered the Auckland region, I was struck with a very unexpected feeling.  I felt as though I'd just been on vacation, and now I was coming home.  Not home to the Bay, but home to Auckland!  I had missed Auckland in my time away!  The familiar sights, the familiar streets, the familiar places all called to my heart as though I was a child who had been found.  Yes, it was good to be back, even if only for a day.

We will picking up Kayleigh's sister, Megan at the airport in Wellington on Dec 21st and she will be traveling with us through Christmas and New Years, so the plan from here is to slowly make our way south towards Wellington, stopping off at various places along the way to have some fun.  First stop - the Coromandel Peninsula for the second big tramp of our trip.  The Kauaeranga Kauri Trail - AKA the hike to the Pinnacles.  This trail is infamous for it's unforgiving stairway featured in the Led Zepplin hit Stairway to Heaven (I kid, I kid, but if you've seen this stairway you'd understand).  The trail rises some 600m to the towering spires at the summit of the Coromandel Mountains known as the Pinnacles.  Anyone whom I've ever spoken of this trail does so in a sort of handshy way, so I've been looking forward to this hike with a bit of apprehension.  

We started around 9:30am along the 3 hour Webb Creek Trail to the Pinnacles Hut.  And guess what?! Neither Kayleigh or I found it to be as bad as its reputation made it out to be.  Long staircase, yes, but completely manageable.  With the help of our handy walking sticks we made it up to the DOC maintained Pinnacles Hut in 30 minutes less than prescribed!  Hooray for us!  We were feeling so good after arriving at the hut that we briefly considered doing the hike as a day hike, rather than staying in the hut for the night as we had originally planned.  So after a short rest in the hut, we continued the remaining 30 minutes or so to the top of the Pinnacles themselves.  The final 30 minutes is more like what I'd imagined the full three hour ascent to be like.  It was tough, and Kayleigh was feeling a little beat, but I feel like the Duke's Nose was much harder.  Once at the top the views were sweeping panoramas of the Cormandel Mountains, peninsula, and even the flatlands of Waikato to the south!

Almost there!

Finally!

On the way down from the Pinnacles we were feeling a little less smug and decided that it would be a good idea to stay in the hut overnight after all.  So we did what we could to kill the time (it was only about 2pm after all) until nightfall.  When we went in to check out the bunk room we realized we had made a grave oversight.  We hadn't brought any blankets or our sleeping bags to help stave off the cold.  "We'll be fine" we thought.  It had, after all, been a pretty warm day.  If worst came to worst, we did have our jackets and a towel that we could drape over ourselves.  Stupid stupid stupid.  The night was cold and the bed was small.  We huddled together for warmth, with no room to turn over even if we had wanted to.  We got through the night with some sparse pockets of sleep in between shivering and cramping muscles.  

6:30 am, the sun was coming up and we were awake, as we had been much of the night.  There was fog covering the tops of the mountains today, and we decided to just get up and head for the car instead of wasting more time in the cold trying to sleep.  On the way back we chose to go the alternative route back down to the road in order to try and catch a glimpse of the viewpoint from the top of Billgoat Falls.  This was another bad decision, as it added an additional hour onto our return route, and somehow added a significant climb to our return to the valley floor, saving all the downhill for the last hour or so of the trial.  Add to the fact that we had only a granola bar and an apple each left to eat for breakfast that morning and it turned to be quite a challenging endeavor.  The Pinnacles reputation turned out to be true after all.