Tongariro is three volcanoes standing shoulder to shoulder in the middle of New Zealand's North Island, with a landscape between them that is still being built. Ruapehu is the tallest at 2,797 metres, the North Island's highest point and an active volcano with a hot crater lake on top. Ngauruhoe is a near-perfect cone of black scoria, known to most of the world as Mount Doom. Tongariro itself is a broad set of ridges and craters rather than a single peak. The ground between them steams, smells of sulphur and grows almost nothing. In 1887 the paramount chief Horonuku Te Heuheu Tūkino IV handed the three summits to the Crown as a shared sacred trust, and in 1894 they became New Zealand's first national park. A century later the land won a rare double UNESCO listing, for the volcanoes and for their meaning to Ngāti Tūwharetoa.
The classic way in is the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, a 19.4-kilometre day walk often called one of the finest anywhere. It climbs through old lava flows and across the grey ash pan of South Crater, where nothing grows and steam drifts from vents at the edges. Then it tops out on the rust-red rim of the Red Crater and drops down loose scoria to the Emerald Lakes, which glow an unreal green with sulphur hanging in the air. Beyond them sits the deep Blue Lake, so sacred that eating beside it or touching its water is forbidden. These are dangerous mountains: Ruapehu erupts every few decades, and on Christmas Eve 1953 a wall of crater-lake water swept away a railway bridge at Tangiwai and killed 151 people. The local iwi ask visitors not to climb the summits at all, because the peaks are ancestors and standing on them means standing on their heads.