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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 1 (May 1, 1933)

[section]

Maungakakaramea, Rainbow Mountain, the well-known landmark of the Rotorua-Waiotapu-Taupo highway, is hot from crown to toe. Its feet are bathed in hot lagoons and creeks, which mark the spot where the Te Whaiti-Urewera road leaves the highway. Steam ascends from these lagoons, and from the Waiotapu hot pools a mile away; steam issues also at points up Rainbow Mountain, which is adorned with two craters, steaming in places. Right alongside the path (and horse track) which the Forest Service has graded to the top of the mountain, you may put your hand to the ground and feel it hot. One sign of hot ground is a recumbent (and unique) form of manuka, which loves the heat so well that it reclines along the ground and refuses to ever be pea-sticks. When the Forest Service was carrying a telephone to the top of the mountain, it found hot mud even at the bottom of the last post-hole, practically at the summit.

Maungakakaramea is therefore incorrigible, but this does not worry Mr. Alexander McAlpine, who spends the summer in a little eagle's nest, which in the distance looks like a glorified trig. Mr. McAlpine is there because this is the chief look-out station of the Kaiangaroa plantations—the eye of the Forest Service, ever alert for fire. To protect the plantation asset, which represents an investment of about a million pounds, means constant vigil during the fire danger months. It is the fire guard's duty to watch, and to give warning by telephone. Mr. McAlpine is concerned not about the heat of the mountain under his feet, but about fire that may occur ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty miles away. His little one-roomed, windowed look-out is perched on top of a furnace, and this does not matter, but a fire fifty miles away on the Rangitaike boundary matters a good deal. Probably if one of the craters below him blew out, he would merely advise Kaiangaroa that the disturbance was not within Kaiangaroa's limits (Maungakakaramea being not a forest reserve, but a scenic reserve, and being placed under Forest Service administration merely because the mountain is the best possible site for a fire guard's lookout. At the same time, the scenic view from the lookout, embracing the whole of thermal lakeland, Tarawera, the Rangitaiki, Urewera, Taupo, with Ruapehu's snowfield gleaming white in the far south, is surely the finest in New Zealand.)

But Mr. McAlpine need not worry about the Maungakakaramea craters. A forester found in one of them a rata page 22 estimated to be four hundred years old. The rata has been waiting for trouble much longer than any human being will have to wait.

The eagle's nest, and the old Scottish eagle within it, have been a boon to the drivers of tourist motor vehicles on the highway below. Tourists are told by the drivers that the man on top of the mountain is a white tohunga whose wife was lost in the lagoon, and who keeps vigil on Maungakakaramea's crown till the lost one shall reappear, rising majestically from the blue waters.

But anyone seeking romance need not weave legend. He can sit at Mr. Mc-Alpine's window and see a panorama of far and near—almost at his feet, the steam of Waimangu geyser and the ruins of the Accommodation House which, with several human lives, was victim to Waimangu's wrath. A little further away he sees the huge and sinister rent in Tarawera Mountain, and he sees at its foot Lakes Tarawera and Rotomahana, the latter swollen in size, and between them a narrow isthmus, near which a whole Maori village and all its 146 people were overwhelmed by the Tarawera eruption of 1886. He looks down on the graves of the Pink and White Terraces. For the romance of realism, for beauty and terror, for a bird's eye view of all that is most wonderful in Nature, this Maungakakaramea prospect stands alone.

(Rly. Publicity photo.) The children's swimming pool on the waterfront at Napier, North Island, N.Z.

(Rly. Publicity photo.)
The children's swimming pool on the waterfront at Napier, North Island, N.Z.