The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 6, Issue 7 (February 1, 1932.)
Mountain Glory
Mountain Glory.
American tourists in a luxury liner cruising the Pacific recently, voted Fusiyama the most beautiful mountain they had seen, with our Ngauruhoe second. It was evident, of course, that they had not seen Mt. Egmont. Beautiful is scarcely the adjective for Ngauruhoe. Wonderful, symmetrical, conjecture-stirring, but not the beauty of Egmont.
If we confine ourselves to the Tongariro National Park, the northern bastion of the Ruapehu Range, is to my mind, the most beautiful thing in all those mountains. This is the height mapped as Te Heuheu Peak, named after the Chief who gifted the mountain tops to the Crown, and after his famous family line. Perhaps the best place from which to view it is from the Waihohonu
stream and the campers' huts thereabouts, five to six miles from the mountain. From there it is a perfect pyramid in outline, looming considerably larger than the more distant and higher peaks of Ruapehu. Once four of us were camped at the Waihohonu for eight days, under winter conditions, and the sight of Te Heuheu Peak snow-clad from foot to summit, with the glow of sunset lighting up its western slant with rose and gold, while the eastern slope, sharply defined by the leading ridge, was all in cold blue shadow, was one of those pictures that can never be forgotten. Seen through a framing of foliage in the beech bush at Waihohonu, Te Heuheu should be a delight to the artist eye. It is scarcely less shapely and colourful than Egmont, and it is, I think, a little higher.
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In New Zealand's Northland.
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
Kaikohe township, near the extreme northern terminal (Okaihau) of the Dominion's railway system.