The Redwoods, Rotorua

Why it matters

Start with the ground rather than the trees, because the trees are the newcomers. This forest is Tītokorangi, named for the pā that stands in the hills above it, and the road you drive in on now carries that name — although almost every map, sign and guidebook still says Long Mile Road. The renaming was not cosmetic. It came with the Whakarewarewa Forest development, in partnership with Tūhourangi Ngāti Wāhiao and Ngāti Whakaue, and it was marked at dawn with the raising of four pou whenua. The carvings stand for the tūpuna Tuteata, Hurungaterangi, Taeotu and Te Kahu, and for the descent of Ngā Hapū e Toru o Ngāti Whakaue from Tuteata, who held mana over Tītokorangi. Rotorua Lakes Council's own words for what the pou record are "mana, ancestry, bravery and continuous occupation".

None of which is about redwoods — and that is the point worth carrying in with you. The redwoods are Californian and a hundred and twenty-five years old. They have no place in tradition here, because they arrived long after it; unlike the kauri of the north, these are not ancestors. The land underneath them is a great deal older, and it is worth knowing whose it is before you park on it.

The trees themselves are here because of an experiment that failed. New Zealand was cutting its native forests faster than anything replaced them, so the state set out to find empirically what else would grow: around a hundred and seventy tree species were put into the ground at Whakarewarewa to see which took. The seedlings, redwoods among them, went in in 1901, and by the standard account the planting was done chiefly by prison labour.

The experiment produced a clear winner, and it was not the redwoods. Radiata pine — Monterey pine, from an unpromising stretch of the Californian coast — took to New Zealand so completely that it became the country's dominant commercial species, and you will drive past the consequences for hours. The redwoods grew beautifully, were never the commercial answer, and were left standing.

What survives is small. Of the original twelve hectares of redwood planting, about six hectares remain. This is a grove, not a forest of redwoods; the 5,600-odd hectares around it are largely production pine.

And they are young. A coast redwood averages around six hundred years and can pass two thousand; these were planted a hundred and twenty-five years ago, which in redwood terms is adolescence, and they are already about a hundred and seventy centimetres through the trunk. On height there is a genuine disagreement. The forest's own management gives the largest as "approximately 72 metres"; the Treewalk operator invites you to encounter "75-metre-tall redwoods", and Wikipedia's 75 is marked on its own page as needing a citation. We have gone with 72, because it comes from the body that manages the trees and is the only one of the two sourced at all. Either way you will not see the top.

What it's like

The grove does something to sound before it does anything to your eyes. Traffic on Tītokorangi Drive is audible in the car park and gone within thirty paces of leaving it, and what replaces it is not silence but a sort of upholstered quiet — the noise of the place absorbed by a hundred and twenty-five years of accumulated needle litter, which is also what makes the ground give slightly underfoot, like a track laid on foam.

Then the light. Redwood bark is a warm fibrous red-brown that holds colour even in flat weather, and because the canopy is high and the trunks are clean of branches for most of their length, the light arrives low and sideways rather than dappled. The understorey is where it stops looking Californian: this is a Californian canopy over a New Zealand floor, and it is silver fern and mamaku and ponga all the way down, tree ferns standing twenty metres under trees standing seventy. Nowhere else looks quite like it, and the reason is that nowhere else was this particular accident.

How to visit

The combinations are where the money is, and they sit on two different booking systems — Treewalk, Nightlights and Glowworms on one, Altitude on another. The Redwoods Adventure Combo covers all four for NZ$199, spread across up to three days, against at least NZ$235 bought individually. There is also a Treewalk-and-Nightlights combo and an annual pass.

One rate is in the checkout but not on the website's price panel: a New Zealand SuperGold cardholder pays NZ$28 for the daytime Treewalk, the child rate rather than the adult one. Bring the card.

Getting there and gates. The main entrance is on Tītokorangi Drive, five kilometres south-east of the city centre and ten minutes by car; the forest's own directions still give Long Mile Road in brackets, and so do most maps. The main vehicle gates open at 5.30am and close late; the Waipa Mill Road car park runs 6am to 11pm and Te Pūtake o Tawa 6am to 9pm, and walking and riding are not restricted to gate hours. The Visitor Centre and i-SITE opens 9.30am, until 10.30pm in summer and 9.30pm in winter, every day but Christmas.

Before you ride, check the closures in the right place. This is a working production forest and trails shut for felling at short notice. The live source is the Rotorua Trails Trust's closures page — current in July 2026, naming specific trails, and warning that closures are "Dependent on Timing/Location of Felling Operations and can change without notice". Not a general tourism listing.

Making the most of it

Walk the free grove first, then decide what to buy. Half an hour under the trees will tell you whether you want to be up in them, and it costs nothing to find out. A surprising number of people pay for the Treewalk before discovering that the thing they actually came for is at ground level.

In summer, book Nightlights late and pay less. The price ladder is real and it is steep: on a late-December evening the twilight and early slots are NZ$55, the 11pm slots drop to NZ$49, 11.40pm is NZ$45 and the after-midnight slots are NZ$39. That is nearly thirty per cent off the same walk for going to bed later.

But check what time twilight actually is before you plan the evening. This is the detail that catches families out. In early September the first Nightlights slot is 6pm; in late December it is 8.40pm, and the walk then runs past midnight. A midsummer Nightlights is a late night, not an after-dinner stroll.

Add Glowworms to a Treewalk ticket rather than buying it separately — NZ$19 against NZ$29 for an adult, NZ$9 against NZ$15 for a child. And if you are doing Altitude, do not buy Glowworms at all: it is already included.

Take the SuperGold card if you have one, and ask at the desk rather than assuming the website's price panel is complete. It is not.

Come early. The gates open at half past five and the grove is at its best with low light in it and nobody else in it; the car park fills from mid-morning.

Nearby

The forest is genuinely in Rotorua rather than out of it, which is unusual for anything this size. Whakarewarewa village sits on its western edge, close enough that the two share a name and a history.

Te Pūtake o Tawa, on Tarawera Road, is the forest's other hub and the better starting point for the trail network, which the New Zealand Cycle Trail puts at "around 200km of purpose-built trail" — a figure worth treating as approximate, since published totals for this forest vary a good deal. The Blue Lake, Tikitapu, is a few minutes further along the same road, and the road continues to the Buried Village and eventually to Lake Tarawera.

If you are collecting the district's set pieces, Rotorua itself has the rest of them within twenty minutes, and the geothermal parks south of the city are a completely different kind of day from this one.