Taranaki once lived with the other mountains of the central North Island: Tongariro, Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe. Unfortunately, Taranaki fell in love with a pretty hill called Pihanga, who happened to be the wife of Tongariro. After a fiery battle with Tongariro which he lost, the tall and handsome Taranaki, like many a young man, headed west. His falling tears at…
Never in my life have I felt more in the center of Muir’s flow of nature than from a high windy knob on Ball Ridge under the vertical Caroline Face of New Zealand’s highest peak, Aoraki/Mt Cook[1]. Long tongues of glaciers stretched from the high snowfields of the Southern Alps all around us down toward aquamarine Lake Pukaki and the…
