Ohakune

Where it sits. Ōhakune is a town of little more than a thousand permanent residents on the southern side of Mount Ruapehu, at about 600 metres above sea level where the volcanic plateau drops away toward the Whanganui hill country. State Highway 49 runs through it, the North Island Main Trunk railway skirts the northern edge, and the Ohakune Mountain Road climbs straight out of town toward the Tūroa ski field seventeen kilometres and a thousand vertical metres above. The volcanic ash and pumice soils around the town are unusually deep and free-draining, which is why the flats to the south are carved into market gardens rather than pasture — a genuinely unusual sight in a country given over almost entirely to grass.

Carrots, timber and trains. Ōhakune's fortunes have turned three times. It began as a sawmilling settlement clearing the podocarp forest that the main trunk railway opened up after 1908. When the millable timber ran out, market gardening took over: the volcanic soils suited root crops, and by the middle of the twentieth century the district was producing a substantial share of the country's carrots, along with swedes, parsnips and potatoes. The town's monument to this is unapologetic — a seven-and-a-half-metre fibreglass carrot standing upright beside the highway at the eastern entrance, erected in 1984 and now the most photographed object in the district after the mountain itself. The third turn was skiing, after Tūroa opened in 1978 and gave Ōhakune a winter economy and the Junction, a compact strip of bars and restaurants at the northern end of town that becomes genuinely busy on a July Saturday and near-silent in November.

On screen. The Middle-earth location that belongs to Ōhakune is Mangawhero Falls, a short signposted stop on the Ohakune Mountain Road where the Mangawhero River drops perhaps ten metres into a dark, mossy basin walled with columnar rock and overhung by beech. This is the Forbidden Pool from The Two Towers — the scene where Gollum, muttering to himself, catches fish in the pool below the fall while Frodo is forced to lure him into the open and Faramir's rangers hold their bows on him from the rocks above. The path in takes five minutes on a formed track from a roadside car park. The surrounding beech and mountain cedar forest along the lower mountain road supplied the Ithilien woodland in the same sequence. Note that Tawhai Falls, on the opposite side of the mountain near Whakapapa Village, is widely signposted as "Gollum's Pool" and looks strikingly similar; the fishing scene was filmed here on the Mangawhero, not there.

The Old Coach Road. Ōhakune's other genuine attraction is a piece of engineering history. Between 1906 and 1908 the two ends of the main trunk railway were still unjoined, and a cobbled coach road was built to carry passengers across the gap between Ōhakune and Horopito. Fifteen kilometres of it have been restored as a walking and cycling trail, part of the Mountains to Sea route. It passes through tall untouched rimu forest, crosses the hand-laid cobblestones still in place after a century, and runs beneath two viaducts: the curved steel Hapuawhenua Viaduct of 1908, some 284 metres long and 45 metres high, now decked for walkers, and the smaller Taonui Viaduct. Shuttle operators run one-way drops so the ride can be done downhill.

What else is here. The Ohakune Mountain Road itself is open year-round and is the fastest way from a town centre to alpine tussock anywhere in the North Island. Waitonga Falls, thirty-nine metres and the highest in Tongariro National Park, is reached by a boardwalked track off the same road that crosses the Rotokawa wetland, where a shallow tarn reflects Ruapehu on windless mornings. The Mangawhero Forest Walk and the Old Blyth Track give shorter forest loops from the lower road. Turoa's base area is the practical destination in winter, with no accommodation on the mountain and everyone commuting up from town.

Getting there and timing. Ōhakune is roughly four hours north of Wellington and five south of Auckland by road, and the Northern Explorer train stops at the station on the northern edge of town several times a week, which makes it one of the few New Zealand ski destinations reachable without a car — though not without one once you want to reach the snow. Winter is the busy, expensive season and accommodation is booked out months ahead for school holidays. Late summer and autumn are quiet, cheap and reliably clear, and the cycling and waterfall walks are at their best then. Frost is possible in any month at this altitude.