Rangitoto Island

Why it matters

Auckland is built on about fifty volcanoes and Rangitoto is the last one to arrive. It is also, on its own, bigger than all the others put together: the Science Learning Hub puts the material it threw out at 2.3 cubic kilometres, close to the total of every previous eruption in the Auckland field combined. That is why it looks the way it does. Most of the city’s cones are scattered, quarried, built over and hard to read as volcanoes at all. Rangitoto sits offshore and kept its shape, holding an almost perfectly even profile from every angle you can see it — a geological accident that happens to have produced the most recognisable outline in Auckland.

And people watched it happen. Human and dog footprints were pressed into the ash that fell on neighbouring Motutapu and then set, which makes this one of the very few volcanoes anywhere that has an eyewitness record in the ground beside it. The island’s full name carries a different kind of memory: Te Rangi-i-totongia-ai-te-ihu-o-Tamatekapua, which the Department of Conservation translates as the day the blood of Tamatekapua was shed — Tamatekapua being the captain of the Te Arawa waka, who fought a battle here at Islington Bay.

The six-hundred-year figure is the right one to carry in your head, but it is not the whole story, and the signs do not say so. Research funded by the Natural Hazards Commission and published in 2015 found that most of Rangitoto is a pile of lava flows built between about 650 and 550 years ago — and that its oldest flow, dated from wood and shell in the sediment around it, is roughly six thousand years old. Auckland’s volcanoes had been assumed to erupt once and stop. Rangitoto appears not to have read that rule, and the finding matters rather more than a piece of trivia should.

What has happened since is the other half of the interest. The island was declared pest-free in 2011, and more than two hundred species of native trees and flowering plants now grow out of lava with effectively no soil under it — including the largest pōhutukawa forest in the world, and a number of plants that have taken to hybridising or behaving oddly because of the heat and the bare rock. You are walking through a six-hundred-year-old experiment in what arrives first.

What it’s like

You come off the wharf through a carved waharoa representing the ancestor Peretū, and the path is soon crossing open lava — grey-black, loose, and radiating heat back at you on a bright day. There is almost no shade for the middle third of the climb. It is a steady walk rather than a steep one, on rough ground with a lot of loose stone, and the gradient is far less trouble than the surface. Near the top the bush closes in again, the path stiffens into steps, and you come out on a rim looking down into a crater sixty metres deep with a forest growing inside it.

The summit itself is a small platform with seating, a concrete fire command post left from the war, and a view that does the thing Auckland views rarely do: it shows you the whole city at once, both harbours, and a scatter of islands going off to the north-east. It is the obvious place to eat whatever you carried up.

How to visit

How long you actually get. Fullers publishes departures and crossing times but not arrivals; putting the two together gives roughly five and a half hours ashore on a weekday if you take the first boat out and the last back, a little over six at a weekend — and about three and a half if you take the later sailing out and the earlier one home. The walk is two hours. Those two pairings cost exactly the same and make completely different days.

The walk, and a disagreement worth knowing about. DOC gives the Summit Track as 7 km return, two hours, 250 metres of climb, graded easy to intermediate, and Fullers’ own summit-walk page agrees. But Fullers’ island page calls it 2.3 km to the top and aucklandnz.com, the region’s official tourism site, says “a 3.1 km return hike” — under half DOC’s figure. We could not reconcile them and we are not going to pick one. Plan on the two hours, which all four broadly agree on, and add half an hour for the lava caves and twenty minutes for the crater rim. Toilets are at the wharf and near the summit, and nowhere in between.

If you cannot walk it, we cannot currently tell you what to do, and we would rather say so than guess. For years the answer was Fullers’ Volcanic Explorer, a road train that carried people most of the way up. That tour now appears nowhere on Fullers’ website — its old page redirects to the general island page and nothing in the site index mentions it — yet resellers still sell tickets for it, and Fullers has published nothing saying it has ended. Please ask Fullers directly before buying from a third party. DOC also notes there are no accessible toilets, and the track will not take a pushchair.

Making the most of it

Take the Crater Rim Track, which most people walk straight past. It is a twenty-minute, 850-metre loop around the crater from the junction just below the summit, it carries more of the military remains than the summit does, and it gives you the one view the postcards never show: down, into the hole, at a forest growing in the bottom of it.

Bring a proper torch for the lava caves, not just a phone. The Lava Caves Track leaves the Summit Track about forty-five minutes up, and DOC is blunt about what is in there — “dark with low ceilings, jagged rock and uneven surfaces”, with unstable rock to keep off. It is the best thing on the island for children and the worst place to discover your battery is flat.

Look in at Bach 38, by the wharf. Prisoners built nineteen kilometres of hand-packed road here in the 1920s and 1930s, and families built holiday baches along the shore; around thirty survive, largely unchanged since the 1930s, and one has been restored as a small museum by volunteers. DOC says it opens “on some weekends and by appointment”. Expect it to be shut, and treat it as a bonus — the Trust’s own museum page was returning a server error when we checked.

Do not plan on crossing to Motutapu and back. The causeway is real and the walk is lovely, but DOC’s own times give an hour and a half from Rangitoto Wharf to Islington Bay and another hour and three-quarters from there to Home Bay — six and a half hours of walking, against a maximum of about six hours ashore. Cross the causeway and turn round, or give Motutapu a day of its own.

Nearby

Rangitoto and Motutapu are joined at Islington Bay by a causeway, and the two islands could not be less alike: one is raw lava six centuries old, the other is farmland on far older ground, wearing a layer of Rangitoto’s own ash with those footprints set into it. There is no scheduled ferry to Motutapu itself, which is why almost everyone who reaches it walks there from the Rangitoto wharf.

The earlier sailing each day calls at Devonport, so the island pairs neatly with a morning on that side of the harbour if you are staying on the North Shore — twelve minutes from the city, and a Victorian village with two volcanic cones of its own.

For everything that sits further out — Waitomo, Hobbiton, the Coromandel and the rest — see Day trips from Auckland, which is a genuinely different kind of day from this one.