Lost up One Tree Hill

One Tree Hill (Maungakiekie in the language of those who first settled this land) is the tallest of several ancient volcanoes in Auckland. Cornwall Park’s 670 acres include the maunga (mountain) and the park that blankets it with fields of sheep and cows. It is an oasis of green and nature in the midst of a bustling city. One evening at around 6 PM in May, I parked Bessie Jane on Campbell Road and headed into the park. I happily wandered around Cornwall Park for a while, enjoying my thoughts and the gentle feeling of a warm autumn evening. The sun set as I was wandering, long rays of afternoon sun falling on lush green grass as I passed through the flat base of the park and then up the road that circles the mountain like a ribbon, leading ever upward. I reached the top in the dark. 

At the summit, a 30 meter obelisk with a blinking red top stands behind the gravestone of Sir John Logan Campbell, a former governor of Auckland and one of the first European settlers. A statue stands at the base of the obelisk commemorating the first ever human to step foot on this land: Kupe, legendary chief and Polynesian explorer. The view from the top is spectacular: the city spreads out as far as the eye can see in every direction. At night, a thousand lights twinkle and shimmer. On one end stands the sky tower and CBD; cars stream across the Onehunga bridge on the other. The city of Auckland sprawls through a small isthmus between the Waitemata and Manukau harbors. Located solidly in between both harbors, the towering One Tree Hill is perfectly poised to provide a 360 degree view of the harbors reaching their skinny fingers inland towards a city that sprawls for an hour drive in any direction. 

                                                           Kupe above Sir John Logan Campbell's grave

I pulled my phone out to take pictures like the foreigner I am and noticed that my battery was dangerously low. It’s hard to keep things charged in the car and while it had previously been hovering at 20, now it had dipped down to 8.  Fuck. I needed it to get down—I had no idea which direction I’d come up. I had climbed most of the way up using the road but had done some off road in the beginning and wasn’t sure at which point and also didn’t know where the road led. The park is massive and has many entrances and I didn’t want to risk being led away from the entrance I had come from and end up somewhere with the entire mountain again between me and it. 

I decided the best thing to do was to use maps to calibrate myself and take a direct linear route down the mountain to my car instead of following the road which meanders in circuits down the mountain. Campbell Road is a fairly long road that runs parallel to the park and I didn’t know exactly where I had parked on it so I aimed for the middle, thinking I’d recognize the way when I got there. I picked my route and set off, clambering over a low stone fence into the paddocks where the ancient Maori pā (village) used to be. The mountain is incredibly big: you can walk inside the caldera and other smaller craters that are still large enough to house groves of trees. The Maori used to have fortifications at the top of the mountain and stored kumara (sweet potatoes) in massive pits behind the fortifications. Trees grow sporadically but the majority of the mountain is coated in lush grass and is like if you were able to climb a much taller version of the Toltec mounds in Arkansas.

The mountain is quite steep and, being careful not to roll an ankle, I hurtled downwards in the dark, scaring a flock of sheep that had settled down for the night. They scattered in all directions away from me, bleating in terror. The mountain slopes downward in a series of rises and dips and after climbing into the first dip, I was completely disoriented. I could no longer see the city lights anymore, only the grassy slopes of the tall rise in front of me. Once I had climbed to the crest of it, I realized I had forgotten to pick a reference point in the lights and now at a lower altitude, the city looked completely different. I thought I was still on course and kept going. 

                                                                                One of the bowls

I came to a gently trodden footpath and decided to take it for a while since it would surely meet up with the road at some point and there would be gates that would let me through the fences that I didn’t particularly want to climb over in the dark. I took the path for a while before deciding that it was leading me too far from where I wanted to go. I took out my phone to re-calibrate but I was now on my own. The phone was dead. Still halfway up the mountain, I looked out again at the city and tried my hardest to remember the layout of the city below me so that I could use the lights to estimate where I should be headed. Was Campbell Road behind a long field? Which roads intersect with it? How much park should be between the mountain and the car?

                                                    The edge of a ridge with a tree growing against it

I left the path again, heading in a diagonal through two low rises. I came to another footpath and became confused—was this part of the first one that somehow doubled around or was it a different one entirely? I decided to ignore it and continue on my way. I came to a fence and hesitated. I wasn’t sure if it was electrified but I also didn’t want to become more lost looking for a gate. I took the risk and was happy to find that it didn’t zap me. I continued on like this until I found the road at the bottom but now I had a problem—I didn’t recognize where I was at all. This was a part of the park I’d never been in before. I decided to keep the mountain to my left since I knew that with it to my left, the path out would be to my right and I would definitely recognize it if I saw it. I began to walk, reciting a long Spanish ensayo (essay) that I’d memorized to pass the time. As the night wore on, I made increasingly bad decisions influenced by anxiety and my growing exhaustion. At one point I worried that I was gaining altitude and beginning to ascend the mountain again so I doubled back and changed direction. I eventually came to a set of bathrooms that I recognized from a previous time I’d been in the park and decided to take what I thought was a shortcut. This led me to a roundabout which left me thoroughly confused. I didn’t remember this at all. I wandered some more, at one point walking through stone steps that led me to a grove of tall conifer trees, to other end of which lay a well manicured field lined by an evenly spaced row of deciduous trees. I decided to walk to the road so I could read my watch but as I reached the light I saw a man walking towards me. He didn’t look menacing so I asked him if he knew where Campbell Road was and he first pointed one way and then the other. As we talked I realized he didn’t speak much English but he insisted that I follow him. “It’s not safe here at night,” he told me. I might be dumb enough to get myself lost on a mountain but I’m not dumb enough to follow a strange man god knows where. I turned and ran, not noticing the direction I was going. 

Trees growing in a deceptively large bowl

I slowed after a safe distance and walked to a barbecue area with a bathroom inlaid in the ground. I tried to find a map of the park but there was nothing. From vague memories of the park from months ago, I knew this was wrong and that I was nowhere near where I wanted to be. I wandered some more and came to the sakura grove that blooms vibrant pink in the springtime. This I recognized—my coworkers and I had come here after work when they were in full bloom. Now I knew that I was near my former workplace—Greenlane Clinical Centre. 

I had once, months ago, been on a date in the park after work and we had entered the park from exactly where I had parked my car tonight so I knew it was a 40 minute walk back to my car from the clinical centre but I didn’t know in which direction since I’d said fuck that and driven to the date. I began to panic, my mind filling with visions of me settling down to sleep in the cow pasture cuddled with a heifer for warmth. Or worse, walking another circuit around this goddamn mountain and not finding my way out. My mind churned out possibilities: almost everything was closed by now but maybe I could walk to the Mobil station by the racetrack opposite the clinical centre and they might charge my phone enough for me to get directions or an Uber back to my car. I knew from when my cord died in Christchurch that most gas stations here don’t sell charging cables like they do back home so it would depend on whether the person working had brought one. But I didn’t even know if they’d be open and the thought of walking that far only to be disappointed depressed me. It had been four hours since I entered the park and my feet hurt after so much walking. I felt absolutely wrung out and my body begged for sleep. 

View of the obelisk from one edge of the park

My only other option was to walk up Manukau Road and knock on Amelia’s window to ask to crash at hers. I dropped my face into my hands in exhaustion. I could already feel how much teasing I was going to get for this, and not just from Amelia. Well, it’s no one’s fault but your own, I thought and began to trudge in that direction.