Mount Ngauruhoe
— — a cone the island is still finishing.
Not only on a wall.
“A near-perfect andesite cone rising 2,291 metres above the volcanic plateau, the youngest of the three peaks that make Tongariro National Park. Ngāuruhoe is sacred to Ngāti Tūwharetoa, a tapu mountain — climbing it is asked against. The Tongariro Alpine Crossing skirts its base, and most of the photographs people carry home are taken from the South Crater looking up its scree. It last erupted in 1977. From the right angle on a clear morning it looks too symmetrical to be real, which is why a film once asked it to play a mountain that wasn't.
Mount Ngauruhoe, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mount Ngāuruhoe stands 2,291 metres above the central North Island volcanic plateau and is the youngest vent of the Tongariro volcanic complex, built up over the last 2,500 years. The mountain sits within Tongariro National Park, New Zealand's first national park (1887) and a dual UNESCO World Heritage site listed for both natural and cultural value. It lies about 350 kilometres north of Wellington, between Lake Taupō to the north and Mount Ruapehu to the south. Access is from State Highway 47 and the village of Whakapapa, with Department of Conservation huts on the surrounding tracks.
Ngāuruhoe is an andesitic stratocone, geologically a vent of Mount Tongariro rather than a separate volcano. It has erupted more than 60 times since 1839, the last in 1975-77 when ash columns reached 11 kilometres and small pyroclastic flows ran down the western flank. The surface is loose black scoria over older lava layers; from a distance the cone reads as a single dark triangle, but at the base it breaks into ash, scree, and angular blocks. The summit holds a small crater about 400 metres across. GNS Science monitors the mountain with seismic and gas instruments on the surrounding ridges.
The mountain is sacred to Ngāti Tūwharetoa, the iwi that gifted the central peaks to the Crown in 1887 on the understanding they would be protected. Climbing the cone is tapu and the Department of Conservation asks visitors not to ascend; there is no marked route to the summit. The way people meet Ngāuruhoe is the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, a 19.4-kilometre one-way track that passes around its base and over the saddle between the older craters. The crossing takes seven to nine hours and is shuttle-served from Whakapapa and National Park Village. Winter alpine conditions begin in May and last into October.