The Resources of this National Playground

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 31, 31 October 1929, Page 7

The Resources of this National Playground

The great playground, ' only ten miles from the Main Trunk Railway and encircled by motor roads, - is remarkably easy of access from all districts of the island. "The Park is the grandest of schools for education in wild nature—in geology, vulcanology, sub-alpine and alpine flora, glacial action, the action of running water on .rock —all the processes of Nature that the highland countri' shows,” writes Mr.. James Cowan in a very interesting illustrated book on this Park. "Steaming craters, sulphurous pits, a boiling lake, ice-cold lakes, glaciers, snowfields, alpine slopes inviting ‘snowmanship’ in sport; torrents and bubbling springs, rapids and waterfalls, huge cliffs and rocky pinnacles, forests and wild fern gardens, mountain meadows bright with leagues of flowers—to enumerate the varied scenes of Tongariro Park is almost to make a catalogue of all New Zealand’s landscapes."

The beauties of National Park itself need little elaboration. Its charm is that it provides interest and amusement for every class of person, from the skilled

climber, the ski expert, and the botanist, to the man who wants to give’his family a month of change of scene. There is no place in New Zealand more delightful in which to while away 'the hot summer days. It would be possible to spend weeks of picnics, taking lunch out every day to a different place, boiling the billy, and spending the time roaming through the woods and rambling down the beds of streams which finally join the great Wanganui.

It is outside the boundaries of the Park,

too, that visitors will seek for pleasure. Pipiriki, on the Wanganui River, is within a day’s trip. Tokaanu, with its hot springs, on Lake Taupo, is a morning's drive. From there it is possible to fish all day in Lake Taupo or in the wellstocked trout stream, Tongariro (later the Waikato), and to return to the Chateau at nightfall. Even wonderful Wairhkei, with its valley of a thousand smokes, may be visited in a day from the Chateau. <