Earth, air, fire, water, aether. These may sound like spellcasting elements, but here they are the thematic sections in Hazel Phillips’ Fire & Ice, a captivating social history of Tongariro National Park and its two main peaks, Ruapehu and Ngāruhoe.
The latter is now internationally famous as the setting of Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings. But the juggernaut franchise plays fundamentally no role in Fire & Ice, as Phillips goes beyond surface-level engagement to seek out stories of wonder, misadventure, heroism and tragedy that illustrate the peaks’ significance to the region and the people who loved them.
“I wanted to create for myself a more nuanced shift in mountaineering, to go beyond the question of ‘should I stand on a summit’ and to overhaul the whole way we think about our relationships to our mountains and our wild spaces,” she writes.
Fire & Ice is not Phillips’ first tramping-related book. Her 2022 memoir, Solo: Backcountry Adventuring in Aotearoa New Zealand, was shortlisted in the NZ Mountain Film & Book Festival’s book awards. The journalist and self-professed “Ruapehu addict” puts her money where her mouth is, lacing up her boots and hiking into the park repeatedly over the course of several years, chasing down rumours and confirming historical hearsay, adding her own insights and imagery to her extensive archival research.
Fire & Ice opens with “Earth”, tracing many of the memorials found in the park, as well as the history and evolution of its huts and even how a few notorious locals scarpered off into the bush to avoid the draft.
The very first story finds Phillips participating in a literal heist, accompanying an anonymous man, dubbed “Henry”, on his mission to destroy and remove a memorial plaque dedicated to explorer and Tongariro National Park surveyor Hugh Girdlestone, who was killed in World War I. Despite Girdlestone’s passion for the land, Henry found the hammered-in plaque an entitled affront to the landscape and local iwi; Phillips ends up taking the fragments of memorial home in preservation.
“Air” primarily covers some of the tragic airplane and helicopter crashes in the park. Phillips treks out to find the remaining wreckages of several, including of the Lockheed Electra lost on the western slopes of Ruapehu in 1948. The plane, which had been flying from Palmerston North to Hamilton, hit the mountain in near-zero visibility, killing all 13 on board. Rescuers hiked into the snow to recover bodies and personal effects, a sombre instance of the lengths alpinists go to save human life or provide closure. Phillips and a friend track down the plane’s likely coordinates to confirm if anything remained of it.
“Fire” focuses on the park’s volatile volcanoes – in fact, Mount Ruapehu’s famed Crater Lake was, despite the danger, a popular ski and swim destination well into the 1960s, and a historic photo (above) of this kickstarted Phillips’ fascination with the park.
“Water” tracks the ebb and flow of the park’s glaciers and pristine swimming holes, while “Aether” addresses the ghosts and other intangibles that form the backbone of Tongariro’s spiritual history.
Each chapter consciously works to connect people – both in the historical stories and the many friends Phillips convinces to join her on one hike or another – back to the land and the power it holds over our collective imaginations and identities.
The depth and breadth of the stories she gathers is a testament to the park’s ongoing importance to Māori and Pākehā alike. “No matter how much research I did, no matter how well I thought I knew Tongariro and Ruapehu, new material always seemed to be popping up,” Phillips writes.
Her approach to history throughout Fire & Ice is respectful – nowhere is she the arbiter of what side of a story is “right” or what certain people should or shouldn’t have done with our wild spaces. There’s no need for her to preach about the dangers of climate change or the need to protect wilderness spaces; you draw your own conclusions on the strength of Phillips’ writing alone.
Her approach to storytelling is engaging, peppered with excerpts from historical documents (many sourced via requests to increasingly confused Department of Conservation and archives staff), contemporary interviews and, thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign, hundreds of digitised images and maps.
Whether you’re an avid hiker or prefer an armchair adventure, Fire & Ice is a compelling exploration of New Zealand’s oldest national park.
FIRE & ICE: Secrets, Histories, Treasures and Mysteries of Tongariro National Park, by Hazel Phillips (Massey University Press, $49.99), is out now.
