Day 34, day 2 of the round the mountain track – Waihohonu hut to Rangipo hut

Woke up to a great sunrise.

The trail started following sandy dry river beds (which I’m guessing are mostly spring melt), through shorter forest. After a while the scenery started becoming more dramatic and volcanic.

The really fantastic part of the trail is that it changed dramatically about every hour. There was a section that was very desert like, then black volcanic rock, some of it I don’t even know how to describe.

We had to cross a lahar (volcanic mudflow) path. What’s particularly concerning is that just when we were about to start across there was a large booming noise, but coming from downhill not from the mountain. When we got to camp we found out that noise was from a military training area nearby.

We got to the hut super early and thought about going on, but if we skip ahead too much we would turn our four day hike into a three day hike, and we both wanted to enjoy it.