Off-track the ground is menacing. Lava, like angry waves frozen in mid-chop only moments ago, claws at the soles of my boots and threatens to shred my knees if I place a foot wrong. The surface is so uneven that progress is extraordinarily difficult. Occasional rills and channels course like petrified streams through the rougher ground, their solid surfaces a welcome pathway amid teetering plates of broken lava and treacherous bouldery rubble. Out of the shade of the dense thickets of bush, it’s as hot as a furnace. All that black rock absorbs and radiates enough heat to melt Antarctica.
It’s as hostile a spot as you could find anywhere in New Zealand, yet when I turn around, there is downtown Auckland in plain view just a few kilometers away. No landform is more familiar to Aucklanders than Rangitoto Island and yet how many of them ever go there? Its raking, symmetrical cone is a relaxed cousin of those more vertiginous volcanoes Taranaki and Ngauruhoe but Rangitoto is a truely astonishing wilderness right on the doorstep of the city.
Landing on the island, the graceful sweeping curves seen from a distance quickly give way to a magnificent mosaic of the tortuous lava I’ve been scrambling through and scrubby, inpenetrable pohutukawa forest.
Of course, it was not always like this. The familiar form of Rangitoto did not exist for generations of Maori who first inhabited the lands surrounding the Waitemata Harbour. However, the emergence of the youngest and largest of the fifty-odd volcanoes in Auckland’s volcanic field, was witnessed by Maori living on adjacent Motutapu Island.
The persistent yelping of mangy dogs might first have awoken them. Soon afterwards a thundering roar and the vibration of the sandy ground beneath them would surely have jolted them from their whare. Outside, the familiar vault of stars above and the scatter of bright campfires along the shore to the west was hidden by a pall of steam, strobed by lightning and lit by a ferocious fiery glow from beneath. A wind shift and the familiar smells of the camp—wood smoke, the sea, and even the penetrating stench of shark flesh drying on manuka frames—were soon overpowered by the pungent, suffocating odour of sulphur dioxide. Running across the beach and dragging waka into the sea, shoals of dead fish bumped against their legs as they waded into the cold shallows. Paddling hard towards safety, the first wet ash began to fall, sticky and abrasive. Looking behind them, the cataclysm was becoming clearer in the first light of day, black clouds blasting out from the base of a roiling column of steam, flying boulders arcing white streamers through the sky and splashing into the sea.
Proof exists that in the weeks or months following the onset of the eruption, people came back to their campsite on Motutapu Island. The footprints of a small group of adults and children were found sandwiched between layers of Rangitoto ash. Markings show where the ground was prodded with sticks and that one of the dogs with the group paused to drink from a puddle. The impressions were so well preserved that the next blanket of ash must have spewed from the maw of Rangitoto soon after they were made. Whether these people were foolhardy or brave, lured by curiosity, or a desire to retrieve taonga, we’ll never know.