The Pinnacles!

Alright, so this past Saturday, Petro dropped Shaina and I off at the bottom of the Pinnacles. I have mentioned these in the past, and I have shown a picture of them (the hill/mountain with the three points). If you live or are visiting the Coromandel Peninsula, hiking up the Pinnacles is definitely the thing to do! In total, it took us a little over six hours. This was including multiple stops for pictures and eating. Since we didn't have a cell phone to contact Petro when we were done, she just gave us seven hours, so Shaina and I took our time.

We woke up early and headed to the Pinnacles around 8. They are located in a woodsy area that is also a campground. There are numerous different treks you can take, but we drove all the way to where the opening of the Pinnacles is. Our hike began at about 8:30AM.

This is the first thing you get to cross when heading up. It's a swing bridge. I have never been on one before so it was pretty neat. The picture is a little blurry because I was bouncing up and down while Shaina took my picture. 

This was mine and Shaina's first tramp by ourselves, but it was pretty easy since there was a pretty nice path. There was a point kind of in the beginning, however, where we had to cross a river. The path basically became just walking up a ton of stone steps and pathways. We weren't entirely sure we were on the right path, but we were! Apparently the stone steps were carved our to make it easier for horses to go up them, but I can't ever imagine horses getting up what we had to!

These are n't the stone steps I was talking about, but we just thought it was a cool place for a picture.

I thought this was a fun hike because you are walking on the rocks of the mountain and not all wooden steps like the last summit we went up. It was a really pretty walk through the woods.

Remember those Kauri trees NZ is famous for? This is one of them that was chillin on the ground. It was a little creepy sitting inside of it because I hate bugs, but I did it! 

Here is the tree from an outside perspective. I can only imagine the noise it made when it came down! It definitely provided some fortunate soul with a lot of Kauri wood!

After about two hours, we arrived at the hut and sat down for a snack and some water. At the time we got there, it was completely empty except for the guy that cleans it. You can choose to walk up to the hut, stay overnight for about $15 and then walk up the rest of the way to the Pinnacles in the morning and then walk all the way back. The only bad thing about that is that you have to sleep in a room with 40 other people, and they don't provide you with food or rubbish containers, so you need to carry all of your sleeping stuff, food, and rubbish with you on your trek. When we got there for lunch, everyone was gone (we had passed people on their way back down while we were heading up). Shaina and I decided just to do it in one day since we didn't really see the need to stay overnight. The guy that works there cleaning says that he walks up on a Monday, stays for a week, and then goes home on a Monday. That makes sense so that he doesn't have to walk two hours there and back each day! Plus someone has to stay overnight to make sure people are respecting the place.

I didn't take this picture, but this is what the hut looks like. It is pretty big. It has two rooms that sleep 40 people each, a kitchen, and many decks with tables where people can dine in. This is one of few huts that people can stay in that has both gas and electricity, so it's pretty nice.

Once we left the hut, we had about a half hour walk left, which included 565 steps and some rock climbing.

We're basically walking to the top of that high point in the picture. It doesn't look like it, but it is just all rock at the top where we were sitting.

In this picture, you can kind of follow the steps we had to take to start climbing to the top. Although 565 steps stinks, it was nothing compared to last weekend's 1349!

Being the tourists that we are, we stopped to take many pictures. This wasn't even all the way up yet and the view is amazing!

I look like I'm on top of the world! But I'm still not even to the top of the Pinnacles yet.

So once we got to the steps, there were two medal ladders we had to go up, and then it was rock climbing from there on to the top. You can see that they put in some handles and places to put your feet which was helpful, but it still felt pretty scary! You look behind you and all you see is open air and a lot of downhill. The trick was to just keep going up! I was really surprised that they let people just do this because it seemed kind of dangerous!

We made it! We made one final climb up some rocks (which has no boundaries  and was the highest you could possibly go). They have a little landing for you to stand on, but Shaina and I wanted the full view so we climbed up! It's about 759 meters up, or a about 2250 feet for us Americans. Therefore, according to Gary's standards, it's a MOUNTAIN, so I climbed a mountain!

One of the fabulous views. Everywhere I turned was just breathtaking. 

I definitely took some selfies because I was on top of a mountain and was trying to show how high up I was.

While we were up there, there were only two other people at first. The first guy passed us on the way up while we were taking some pictures. He was up on the rocks as well and was from NZ. The guy in this picture is from France. He had been traveling for about 6 months on his own. He has mostly been to a lot of Asian countries, and he plans on going to Indonesia after he's done in NZ. Talk about an exciting trip! Then, while we were still sitting up there, we met a guy from Scotland and a guy from Germany. All of these people hiked up alone, so they must have all just been travelling alone. These two guys basically walked up and left right away (which I don't see the point in not enjoying it) and the other two stayed up and chilled for a little bit like we did (taking pictures on a GoPro and writing in a journal). We just sat on our rocks for like 15 min just taking pictures and enjoying the view. Once we got down, we climbed back down to the landing and ate our lunch. It was one of the most magnificent places I have every eaten a meal at, let me say that! It was so nice to just sit, relax, enjoy the view, and eat after walking up.

I suck at taking pictures, I know I'm blocking the lense, but to be honest, I don't even know what part of my body that is. I'd rather have a little bit of skin show though than try and get a perfect picture and fall off my rock to my death! Anyways, in the distance you can see a hill that looks pretty flat. This is called the Table Top (I think you're smart enough to figure out why) and Thames High School takes some students to stay overnight at the campgrounds and to hike up there. I'm not entirely sure what they do, but I think it is just an outdoor experience that they like to do with students.

The nice guy from NZ took our picture. We were staring into the sun, but you can see how high up we are!

Typical "I made it to the top so I through my hands up" pose. 

I know I should be making a scared face, and I have like four of these pictures, but all my not smiling faces just look ridiculous. So if you ignore the fact that I'm smiling, I'm falling off the edge!

This was the little landing that they have. It's really not that big, but it's a nice place to stand and take pictures.

This was taken as I was getting on the ladder ready to make our way back down.

This was taken on our way back down. The rocky part on the left is where we were...at the VERY top! The picture does not do a very good job at depicting what it actually looked like up there. It may not seem very high, but this picture was taken while we were still climbing down the steps, so we were still very high up ourselves.

We headed back around 12:30. We had planned for Petro to pick us up at 3:30, so we knew we would make it back in time. The walk back took us a little over two and a half hours since we were stopping and checking out some of the rivers. Hiking up to the Pinnacles was definitely one of the best things I have done so far here. It was challenging and super rewarding once you got to the top! I'm definitely glad we had time to fit it into our busy schedules and I can't wait for the next couple weekends when I get to do more hiking!