Mini-break
Raglan’s raw beauty
On the road out to Whāingaroa/Raglan, the striking silhouette of bush-clad Mount Karioi is a welcome respite from the Waikato’s wide expanses of flat dairy farmland.
The mountain’s profile resembles a woman in repose, and local iwi tell that Karioi and neighbouring Pirongia are sisters. As the story goes, Karioi had a lover called Karewa, but in a classic love-triangle twist, he fell for her sister. When Karioi found out, she pushed Pirongia inland and tossed Karewa out to sea, where he remains as a craggy island, 19 kilometres offshore from Kāwhia Harbour.
Surf’s up
Aside from her strident approach to resolving matters of the heart, there’s a lot to love about this maunga for locals and visitors alike. Most famously, Karioi’s distinctive geography helps create a world-class surf break, Manu Bay, which is said to offer one of the longest rides in the world, and attracts scores of international surf tourists all year round.
But Karioi herself hides a multitude of lesser-known treasures.
She’s the only West Coast mountain in the North Island with bush cover from summit to sea, and that makes for some special biodiversity. In
autumn, trampers on her trails frequently spot werewere-kōkako (Entoloma hochstetteri), the luminous-blue mushrooms that decorate our $50 note.
The maunga is also an ancient hub for birds that spend most of their lives at sea, and alight on land solely to breed and raise chicks. “Historically, it would have been covered in seabirds,” says Rebecca Towle, who is the volunteer and advocacy coordinator for the Karioi Project, an energetic local NGO focussed on conserving and restoring the mountain’s biodiversity. “And they’d be bringing in with their guano all the nutrients from the sea, and excavating to make their burrows – we say they’re ecosystem engineers.”
Unfortunately, in recent years, “we’ve lost almost all of our seabirds to predators,” she says – mostly rats, stoats, ferrets and feral cats. The only remaining native seabird is the ōi, or grey-faced petrel (Pterodroma macroptera), of which a tiny remnant population was discovered in 2014. Since then, the Karioi Project has opted to wrap its work around boosting ōi populations through intensive predator control, habitat restoration and protecting breeding burrows.
That can be challenging, because ōi nest very close to the coastline, where lots of humans now hang out, too: in late December, chicks fledge from the cliffside just metres above popular Ngarunui Beach. “So there’s this incredible thing happening – the special treasure of this seabird chick that’s taken six months to get to the point where it can fledge from its burrow – and then there’s all these people and dogs right below them,” says Towle. “They’re also nesting under people’s spa pools at Manu Bay – and once we had some nesting under a kayak in someone’s garage!”
This proximity might be risky, but it also has its advantages. “What we’ve got is this chance to really have a community wrapped around a seabird habitat,” says Towle. “Habitat loss is obviously one of the reasons we’ve lost some of the seabirds, but now we’re hoping that we can kind of turn that on its head – if the community and the tourist market can realise how special these seabirds are, and learn how they can protect them, then we might be able to use the fact that people are living here as a benefit rather than a drawback.”
Eco initiatives
Locals are increasingly engaged in showing their love for the maunga: as of 2019, over 350 volunteers had carried out 27,740 hours of hard work with the Karioi Project, and 174 local households are doing predator control on their own properties. Several other ‘green’ enterprises are scattered across the mountain’s girth, too. On Te Hutewai Road, groundbreaking recycling centre Xtreme Zero Waste is blazing trails in resource recovery (and is an excellent place to op-shop!). In the bush above Whale Bay, the Institute of Awesome (formerly Karioi Lodge) hosts school camps where young people collaborate to solve environmental challenges using cutting-edge technology. Further west, where Whaanga Road turns into gravel and the Tasman Sea stretches wide, Tiny House Escapes offers stunning off-grid accommodation in a cabin, a tree-house and a converted bus.
Other local initiatives are finding creative ways to honour Karioi and support her rehabilitation: the Raglan Karioi Trail, dubbed the ‘steepest running race in New Zealand’, and the Karioi Classic – a round-the-mountain bike race – both raise funds for the Karioi Project. “Both of these events really show how much people love the mountain,” says Towle.
“What we’ve got is this chance to really have a community wrapped around a seabird habitat.”