Peaks and Places | Travel and Adventure Blog

After we finished up with Taranaki, we had about four days to kill before needing to be back in Auckland to pick up Taylor’s sister, Shelby, and her fiancé, Logan. We really didn’t want to spend these days just waiting around in Auckland, so we looked for other places we could check out along the way. We were coming from Taranaki, which is on the Southeast side of the North Island. We killed a few days in Hamilton and Cambridge, checking out the farmers markets and towns. After this we had our fill of the ‘city’ life, so we wanted to explore while we had some time. We really didn’t know where to go, but we ended up back at the Coromandel which is kind of the opposite side of the North Island. This doesn’t make much logical sense, but we like the area, so it made sense to us at the time.

The area we were aiming to check out was the Karangahake Gorge. We knew very little about the area, but it looked pretty cool on our maps and we saw there were multiple hikes to do. We originally planned to be hiking for about an hour to check out the old railway tunnel and then head back to the van. The old rail way tunnel is about a kilometer long, with about 15 foot high ceilings and roughly 10 feet wide. The floor was paved over so it was really easy walking. Luckily it was lit the entire way, because Taylor and I forgot headlamps (again). Access to the tunnel was from a footbridge that went over the river and State Highway 2. When we came out the other side, we crossed over another bridge, back over the same river, and realized that now the highway went over us, in a bridge overtop the exit of the tunnel.

Once out of the tunnel, we had a nice path along the banks of the river which gave us a good vantage point of the gorge. Along the hike, we went a bit out of our way to see the Karangahake Gorge waterfall. The trail leading to the waterfall was pretty overgrown and muddy. It was pretty tall, but not all that impressive compared to some others we have seen. It was worth the little detour and we would go back to it if we were hiking around Karangahake Gorge again. We made our way back towards the van, and we realized we would never make it back in an hour. The tunnel and falls took us a good bit longer than we planned.

As we hiked back, we decided to take the longer way around and we saw a lot of old mining buildings, the largest of which were the Crown Battery and Talisman Battery (“battery” is New Zealand mining slang for “mill”). The mining history made me want to check out more of the hikes in the area. If you’ve been following along, you know I like this kind of stuff. We eventually came onto the coolest part of the Gorge, the old mine workings. Specifically, the Windows walk, which took us through the old underground pumphouse for the Talisman battery. We snaked our way through the workings for about half an hour. Every few hundred feet we would get a “window” which overlooked the gorge. I really enjoyed this part of the hike, it was cool making our way through the old mine workings and seeing how well they’ve held up over almost 100 years.

As we came out of the windows walk, we were on the far side of the mountain, and due to a closed swing bridge and some landslides, had to go back the way we came in, which was fine by me. On our way out, basically at the end of the workings, we thought finally to look for glow worms, and sure enough they were right above us. There was actually plenty of them all in the little cracks of the roof, if only we had thought to look up earlier. We eventually made it back to the van after almost three hours of hiking and exploring.

On our drive out of the gorge, we stopped at one more waterfall, Owharoa Falls. This was a short hike to a nice ~30 foot high falls. It looked like it would be a cool place to swim in the summer, but not on a brisk day, which it was. I thought these falls looked man made, like if you told someone to make you a big set of falls for your backyard, or something you’d see in a waterpark. After this, we were just about out of the gorge, which was good timing because it was starting to rain, and we had to get back on the road.

At its peak, in 1909, Karangahake Gorge produced roughly two thirds of all gold produced in New Zealand. A good portion of this came out of Karangahake Mountain itself, which was riddled with underground workings (more than 16 levels of shafts, adits, and tunnels through the quartz). Gold mining eventually ceased in the Karangahake due to the nature of the ore. Apparently, the ore was long grade and the gold was difficult to recover with the technology at the time, the batteries were all closed down by 1955. The use of cyanide dramatically improved the recovery of Karangahake gold bringing it from 45% up to 92%. Cyanide can be used to help recover gold (and is still used at some mines today – although heavily regulated), one method of using cyanide was first implemented at the Karangahake batteries. By the end of it, the Karangahake Gorge produced about 3.5 millions ounces of gold.