On December 10, 2024, a juvenile bottlenose dolphin was reported tangled in fishing line near Riverhead, in the upper reaches of the Waitematā Harbour. The dolphin couldn’t flex its tail properly, or dive, or chase fish. Its pod headed elsewhere. One larger dolphin stayed behind, and for the next month it stuck close, spending almost […]...
Tongariro is by far the most popular national park in the North Island, attracting tens of thousands of skiers, walkers and trampers every year. The park centres around three active volcanoes: Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu, all of which are considered by local Maori to be sacred ancestors. In 1887 the chief of the local iwi Ngati […]...
Trampers, mountaineers and explorers alike have sought shelter within the wooden and iron frames of the nationwide network of backcountry huts for nearly 200 years. Shelter from the Storm details the stories behind these remote abodes. Huts were often built from corrugated iron and whatever materials could be scavenged from the site. In Bealey Spur […]...
Confrontations between Japanese whalers and anti-whaling protesters in Antarctica’s Ross Sea have put the Balleny Islands in the news lately. It is a spotlight to which they are unaccustomed. Fewer than 30 landings have been made on these remotest islands in the 168 years since they were discovered. These are not the kind of islands […]...
The Darran Mountains lie deep in the marrow of northern Fiordland—a chunky, perplexing range of diorites and sandstones, gneisses and granites. This is a land of extremes, with the country’s most remote summits, the greatest rainfall and the longest, hardest-to-climb alpine rock walls. Adventurers have been coming here since William Grave and Arthur Talbot in […]...
I slithered along the gravel through a streamway barely 25 centimetres high, 10 centimetres of water lapping gently along the centre line of my face. With my head turned sideways, I could breathe only through the top of my mouth by pursing my lips, awkwardly, into a snorkel shape, as freezing water sloshed about my […]...
This issue’s cover posed a challenge: to present cannabis in a way that was recognisable, but that didn’t immediately call to mind a number of associations. An image of a cannabis leaf has layers of meaning attached to it. We wanted to make it possible for readers to take a fresh look. We are, as […]...
