New Zealand: North Island – Whakarewarewa State Forest

🌳 Walking Among Giants — Whakarewarewa Forest, Rotorua

The morning did not exactly inspire confidence. The sky had that particular shade of grey that the British Isles have spent centuries perfecting — the sort of grey that doesn’t so much threaten rain as simply promise it with quiet, bureaucratic certainty. It had rained overnight, the kind of steady, purposeful rain that soaks everything without any of the drama you might at least appreciate, and the trees outside were still dripping in that mournful, resigned way. I looked out the window and made the sort of noise a man makes when he’s fairly sure the day is not going to cooperate. Still, breakfast was had, and by some miracle the sky hadn’t actually opened again, so we decided to push our luck and head out to Whakarewarewa Forest — pronounced, for those playing at home, something approximately like “Fah-kah-reh-wah-reh-wah,” which I felt I was getting better at after roughly forty attempts. My wife disagreed.

We’d heard there was a grove of redwoods somewhere in there, and I’d filed that under “probably worth seeing, probably overhyped.” I am very rarely surprised in a good way. On this occasion, however, I was wrong. Completely, embarrassingly, wonderfully wrong.

The Trees That Weren’t Supposed to Be Here

The Whakarewarewa State Forest sits on the edge of Rotorua, in the Bay of Plenty region of New Zealand’s North Island — a part of the world that sits atop one of the planet’s more energetic geothermal zones, which we’ll come to shortly. The forest itself covers around 5,600 hectares, making it one of the largest recreational forests in the country, and it has been managed for public use since the 1960s. But the stars of the show, the reason people drag themselves out on grey mornings, are the Californian Coastal Redwoods — Sequoia sempervirens, if you want to sound like you know what you’re talking about at dinner parties.

These trees are, to be clear, completely foreign to New Zealand. They belong on the fog-drenched Pacific coast of northern California and southern Oregon, where they’ve been growing, some of them, for two thousand years or more. The coastal redwood is the tallest living tree species on Earth — the current record holder, a tree called Hyperion discovered in California in 2006, stands at just over 115 metres. That’s taller than the Statue of Liberty, taller than Big Ben, taller than most things you’ve ever stood next to and thought “that’s quite tall.” They are, in short, absurdly large, and they have no business being in New Zealand.

And yet here they are, and the reason they’re here is wonderfully mundane. In 1901 — the same year Queen Victoria died and Edward VII shuffled reluctantly onto the throne — the New Zealand government planted this grove as part of a timber trial. The thinking was entirely sensible: the country needed wood, redwoods grow fast, problem solved. Around 170 different tree species were trialled in the forest around this time, part of a broader effort by the New Zealand State Forest Service to find commercially viable timber sources for the young colony.

The redwoods grew brilliantly. Enthusiastically, even. Which, it turned out, was entirely the problem. New Zealand’s mild, moist climate suited them so well that they shot upward at a rate that California’s cool fogs never quite managed — which sounds like a success until you cut one down and discover that the speed of growth produces a large core of soft, low-density wood that splinters rather than saws. As timber, they were essentially useless. The tree that had seemed like the answer turned out to be the wrong answer entirely, which is very much how most plans go.

The timber men moved on. The trees did not. And over the following 120-odd years, they just kept growing — slowly, inexorably, magnificently — until they became something far more valuable than planks. They became a cathedral.

Into the Grove

Walking into the redwood grove is, I’ll be honest, slightly shocking — in the best possible sense. You’re walking along a perfectly ordinary New Zealand forest path, and then suddenly the light changes, the temperature drops a degree or two, and you find yourself standing at the base of trees that are genuinely enormous. The trunks are vast — some of them several metres across at the base — and they rise perfectly straight, their bark thick and reddish-brown and deeply furrowed, like something geological rather than biological. The canopy is so high above you that looking up gives you a faint, pleasant sense of vertigo.

The light on a grey, damp morning — and ours was both of those things — does something interesting in a redwood forest. It filters down in long, diffuse shafts, softened by mist and moisture, and it catches the ferns. Because beneath the redwoods, thriving in the deep shade and the damp that the giants create, are tree ferns — New Zealand’s ponga, the silver fern, the very symbol of the country. They grow in enormous clusters, their fronds spreading three and four metres across, and they give the whole scene a quality that I can only describe as primordial. Not in a threatening way. More in the way that makes you feel briefly and pleasantly insignificant, as though you’ve stumbled into something that was here long before anyone thought to name it.

The combination of the towering redwoods, the spreading ferns, the mist and the silence and the soft drip of water from branches overhead — it genuinely felt like a film set. The sort of scene a director spends three weeks lighting to achieve, and here it was, just sitting there, free of charge on a Tuesday morning. I mention this because I want to be clear that the atmosphere was extraordinary, not because I’m going soft in my old age.

The Great Walk Debate

There are several walking options through the forest, ranging from a gentle 30-minute loop — which I was quite keen on — to a more committed 90-minute circuit that takes you deeper into the grove and through varied terrain. There was, inevitably, a discussion. Emily, who has an unfortunate habit of being physically fitter than me and entirely unsympathetic about it, voted for the longer walk. I voted for the shorter one on the entirely reasonable grounds that we’d already had quite a full trip. A vote was held. I lost. Democracy is a fine system except when it produces outcomes you disagree with.

We took the long walk.

And — I say this through gritted teeth — it was completely worth it. The longer route took us beyond the main grove and through sections of the broader forest, where the character changes subtly. The redwoods thin out and you’re among other plantings — Douglas fir, cypress, various natives — and the trail winds gently through a landscape that’s simultaneously managed and wild-feeling. The ground underfoot was that satisfying slightly-soft, slightly-crunchy mix of gravel and leaf litter. The paths themselves are wide and well-maintained, the kind of walking track that makes you feel vaguely virtuous without actually being difficult.

Beyond the Trees

The forest doesn’t let you forget where you are, geologically speaking. Rotorua sits on the Taupo Volcanic Zone, a 350-kilometre rift of geothermal activity that runs diagonally across the North Island and represents one of the most volcanically active regions on Earth. You can’t entirely ignore it. The soil has a faint warmth to it in places. There’s a mineral tang in the air — that faintly sulphurous, earthy smell that Rotorua is rather famous for, and which the locals have long since stopped noticing while visitors spend the first hour trying to politely not mention it. Occasionally you catch a wisp of steam rising from nowhere in particular. It’s a reminder, a gentle one, that the ground beneath you is not entirely dormant.

The forest is also internationally recognised for mountain biking — apparently there are trails here that have hosted world-class competitions and attract riders from across the globe. We did not bike. We watched others bike, with the particular combination of admiration and relief that comes from being a certain age and not being on a bicycle on a technical descent. The riders navigated the flowing single-track trails with what seemed like alarming speed and casual confidence, and the forest absorbed them without complaint. It’s thoughtfully laid out — walkers and riders coexist without much friction, which is rarer than it should be.

By the time we emerged, the sky had not improved — still grey, still dripping — but it didn’t matter. The forest had been magnificent in spite of it. Or perhaps because of it. There’s something right about redwoods in the mist. They’ve been standing through considerably worse.

Emily, naturally, was insufferably cheerful about having won the vote. I maintained a dignified silence on the matter.