Mount Taranaki

Our alarm clock rang just before 7, and like every morning, it was pretty cold. But that helped us to eat breakfast quickly and convert the car. Since there are three people in my car, we pack our things on the front seats every evening, pull out the bed, and inflate the mattress.

Our schedule didn't go quite as planned, and we were about half an hour late. We wanted to be at the mountain as early as possible, as clouds usually form around it in the afternoon.

As we were heading towards Mount Taranaki, the view looked like this:

Later, closer to the summit, it looked mostly like this:

By the way, Mount Taranaki is a volcano and is located on the west coast, to be precise, here:

As you can see from the satellite image, everything around it is quite flat, which means you can see Mount Taranaki very well from anywhere, unless it's swallowed by clouds again.

After the first two hours on a fairly easy trail, we then went through a small valley where we mostly had to climb over rocks and then onto a scree field.

We had already decided that we wouldn't go all the way to the summit, as it would take us about 10 hours in total (there and back). For the final stretch, we simply hid our backpacks, as it was much easier to climb without them.

For maybe half a minute, it cleared up and we could see the summit (well, almost).

By the way, only something like this grows up there.