Words and illustration by Gaz Sullivan

“What I saw when we went for a day in Taupo was mind-boggling…”

We live in Rotorua. We came here for the forest, the trails, the lakes, and the space. It’s great to be able to go to the trails whenever the mood strikes me, which is most of the time. Many visits to the same place do not take the shine off – for me, anyway.

Even so, sometimes it’s good to go somewhere else and, for us, that is often Taupo.

Just north of town is a small, but beautifully formed, mountain bike park everybody calls Craters.

The trails surround a thermal area that was created as a side effect of the bores that drive the Wairakei thermal power station. It is called Craters of the Moon, and that is a fair sort of description of the place.

We have been riding there since the late 1980s, and the trails have evolved, slowly increasing in length and variety.

Craters has a character of its own. With a few exceptions, the trails are narrow and have a carpet of pine needles that results from fairly light traffic. There is not much elevation available, but the builders have been very creative with their use of what they have.

The thing that sets Craters apart for me, is the connectivity of the place and the way it is integrated with the trails that run along both sides of the Waikato River. A rider can set out from town – and I mean the centre of Taupo city – and ride singletrack to the mountain bike park. Then, they can ride trails for hours without having to ride any forestry road at all. The trails are not very technical, but they are fun – and there are places hidden away in Craters that are downright amazing.

A trail drops into a tight little canyon with a waterfall tumbling out from under a tangle of huge boulders, and I take the same photo of my bike parked next to it every time I visit. Can’t help myself. Another follows a different canyon past cliffs on one side and a precipitous drop to a thermally heated stream on the other. Climbing singletrack rewards riders with big views of mountains and lake. It’s easy to clock up 50 kilometres of continuous trail in an outing, maybe many more. I always run out of gas before I run out of options.

The Hub is a well-designed carpark with a cafe directly opposite. It sits one flat white and a muffin from town, and has a nifty underpass taking riders under the main road into Taupo – and the trails beyond.

Well, it did until Cyclone Gabrielle visited. The underpass is there, but Craters is closed. The carnage and heartbreak caused by that storm is well documented, and it may sound petty to be talking about the damage to a mountain bike park when so many people have lost everything, but what I saw when we went for a day in Taupo was mind- boggling. For those of us who dodged any of the serious effects of Gabrielle, it is a sobering snapshot of what happened.

The park was closed when we visited, and it will be for a long time. Could be six months, maybe more. The friendly woman in the Hub Cafe reckoned there were 15,000 trees down. The hill that is visible from the Hub looked like an active logging site, nearly every tree on the exposed slope facing the highway was laying on the ground. Areas further south had trees uprooted, trees snapped off halfway up, or split down the middle. It is an unbelievable mess, and under it all is a lovingly nurtured network of trails.

The ride down the river, past Huka Falls to Aratiatia and back along the other side, has reopened and so that is where I went. It’s bizarre how some trees stand, completely undamaged, right next to a tangle of trunks and branches that are torn and smashed.

Like most places we ride, the trails at Craters didn’t make themselves. They were built by the usual combination of passionate volunteers, people drafted in to help passionate volunteers, and – on a few sections – commercial trail builders. It took decades of applied enthusiasm because, while new stuff was being created, the existing stuff had to be maintained. Again, like most places we go to ride.

Some of the places we go, that are shared with commercial foresters, get periodically wrecked by harvesting – but that is the deal. We know that going in. We try to get started in young trees, to get maximum bang out of our thinly stretched buck.

When a weather system lays waste to a whole trail system in one go, those plans become meaningless. The work in front of the Taupo team is huge – a restoration job that won’t really start until the forestry crews have done what they can to make the place safe to enter.

One thing you can be sure of: it will re-open. The same enthusiasm that built Craters, will rebuild it.