Tuff Crater: Whinging children, disgruntled parents and a maar.

After the enthusiasm of our first climb, week two proved less invigorating. We had planned to head up Big King, but after a busy Saturday, a Sunday morning visit to the North Shore, and it just being so damn hot, we couldn't face dragging ourselves up a relatively steep hill. So we thought, maybe let's just take the kids to Onepoto Domain, because a) it's on the way home, b) it's a reclaimed crater or maar, and c) it's one of the best playgrounds in Auckland. Then my brother suggested we go to Tuff Crater over the ridge from Onepoto, which despite being just off the motorway and maybe five minutes drive from where my in-laws live, we had never been.* Never even seen beyond the mangrove swamp harbour entrance near the Esmonde Rd off-ramp.

So Tuff Crater it was, with the plan for a cheery walk around its edge and a stop-off at Onepoto to give the kids a play on the way back home. As a treat.

The minute the words "as a treat" escape your lips, you should know it ain't happening. 

Looking across Tuff Crater to Mt Victoria in the distance

Fulfulling our Auckland suburban requirements, we popped into a cafe in Birkenhead Point to fuel ourselves for this less than taxing lagoon saunter, steeling myself with caffeine and bribing the children with a gingerbread man and fizzy raspberry drink, and a gingerbread rocket and chocolate fluffy respectively. Then we drove down through Little Shoal Bay, back up to Onewa Rd and past Onepoto to find this fabled mangrove swamp lagoon crater surrounded by Northcote houses and the motorway.

Tuff Crater is named Tuff Crater because it is a tuff ring, or a maar: a low profile volcanic vent located in a lake or coastal region. It is also known as Tank Farm, because of the petrochemical tanks stored there during World War II, but shouldn't be confused with the other prosaically named petrochemical tank storage facility on Wynyard Wharf in the city called Tank Farm.

In Te Reo Māori it is Te Kopua o Matakamokamo, the basin of Matakamokamo; a hotheaded chap whose domestic squabbles ran afoul of Mahuika, the goddess of fire. Onepoto is the basin of his equally tempestuous wife Matakerepo.

Disgruntled child with drink by mangroves

We were a squabbling family by the time we found a street with access to the walkway. One child storming off ahead to see how far her legs could take her from the other child who didn't want to walk or to move and didn't want to be there and why couldn't we just go home now. Mock enthusiasm and idle threats abounded from the parents as we set off through a little grove of native trees around to the viewing platform. Where we discovered that the proposed bridge at the mouth of the lagoon was still very much a proposal, so we couldn't walk the full circumference anyway. Back we trod with one child crying foul play and the other child crying about anything he could think of at the time.

And no we didn't go to the park. NO ONE IS GOING TO THE PARK WITH THIS BEHAVIOUR.

So we went to my parents, who offered to take the kids out to Clevedon. Not for geological, but for geographical and genealogical betterment.

That was Tuff Crater.

P.S. Click here for a link to a much more informative description from the people at Bike Friendly North Shore.

* It is important to remember that my husband grew up in Takapuna and Tuff Crater is in Northcote. They are divided by more than just the motorway. My excuse is that I'm not from the Shore. Hey, how many times have you been to Pigeon Mountain or Stockade Hill, eh?      

Mt St John; Pastoral Idyll

Mt Eden from Mt St John (Sep 2012)

Tucked away between Market and Manukau Rds in the heart of Epsom is perhaps the most pleasantly suburban volcanic cone in existence. Surrounded by gracious villas and bungalows, not to mention a concentration of Auckland's private schools, you can often forget that Mt St John* is there and that it's actually public land. That's right, it doesn't belong to the gardens of houses along Ranfurly Rd or Mt St John Rd.

And it is quite lovely. In certain seasons, it even has a wee lake in the middle of the crater, with cows lowing in the pastures.

Back in September 2012, an enthusiastic wee girl in a Canada hoodie, dolly in hand, joined us in walking up the farmer's track from Market Rd. We had left the little one with grandparents - from his pushchair he was developing his now well-honed dislike of hill walking - and were enjoying being able to saunter up the easy 126m peak without negotiating cowpats and muddy grass with buggy wheels.

The amazing thing was despite being able to see this cone from my school tennis courts, having driven along Mt St John Rd more times than I've had hot dinners, and actually knowing a girl from school whose garden backed onto the hill, I had never been up to the summit and seen its pastoral views. We were utterly charmed.

There really were cows grazing by the pond.

Yet, like most of Auckland's maunga, the bucolic terracing of hillside and crater are signs of habitation much older than the surrounding early-twentieth-century suburb. Mt St John is Te Kōpuke and was a  pā. I do not know its strategic place in the network of villages and defences on the maunga of Tamaki Makau Rau, but you can still see the earthworks and kumara pits over which whare and other buildings would have been built.

Today, in the midday heat of a February Sunday, the grass was brown, the pond had dried up, and the cows were replaced by a handful of shorn sheep sheltering under the crater trees.

 It was hot though, and the boy child whinged muchly perched upon his father's shoulders, but the now somewhat older girl strode with gusto and the same enthusiasm of yore.

Mt St John is one of the little maunga, so it doesn't take long to get up and wander around the crater. Oh, it's a hill and I like hills. So here's to views to the Waitakere Ranges in the west and the Hunua Ranges to the east, the Waitemata Harbour and the Manukau Harbour, and all those mountains yet to (re)climb.

* I wish it was pronounced Mt "Sinjin", Jane Eyre-style, but it is prosaically Mount "Sint" John. 

Maunga - An Introduction

Thanks Wikipedia

Auckland is covered in small volcanoes or maunga. Approximately 53 cones, craters and maars scattered across the city; some prominent, some barely discernible, and a few quarried away entirely for the scoria rock and gravel. 

Rangitoto, Mt. Eden/Maungawhau, Mt Albert/Owairaka, Mt. Wellington/Maungarei, Mangere, One Tree Hill/Maungakiekie, Mt. Roskill/Puketāpapa, Mt. Hobson/Remuwera, Mt. St. John/Te Kōpuke, Big King/Te Tātua-a-Riukiuta, North Head/Maungauika, Mt. Victoria/Takarunga, the list goes on. Remnants of an ancient volcanic field, or in the case of Rangitoto, not ancient at all.

They are focal points of the city skyline, they name our suburbs, and provide open space for the city. Like any self-respecting Aucklander, I love them.

But like most Aucklanders, I tend to only visit them periodically. Mostly when you're giving the Auckland tour to visitors. First stop, a drive up Mt Eden to show them the city. Even when you live in the shadow of Mt Eden and always mean to regularly walk up it, most people don't. Though as of last month, you can no longer drive up Mt. Eden, so maybe we will all start the Auckland tour with a bracing ascent.

Back in 2012 when we had made the decision to move to Canada, we hatched a plan to walk up as many as we could with the kids. Even though they were only 3 3/4 and 17 months old when we first walked up Mt. Roskill on Sunday the 12th August 2012, we wanted a record of them with their maunga. We didn't know how long we'd be away and we wanted them to have Auckland in their bones, to have the mounts in their muscle memory.

Little Auckland Mountain Climbers - Puketāpapa (Aug 2012)

It turned out we were only away for two and a half years, so now that we're back we've decided to revisit the "weekly" mountain climbing. We'll go back to the ones we conquered, and finally get to those we missed. Shamefully, we never took the children to Rangitoto, and we grown-ups have a idea involving kayaks and Browns Island. It shall happen. I also thought this might be a fun then and now blogging project.

So welcome friends, come climb some maunga with us.