Explosion Craters, Now Filled With Some Of The Bluest Water In The Park

The Tama Lakes sit inside explosion craters blown out of the saddle between Mt Ruapehu and Mt Ngāuruhoe. Getting to them is a genuine half-day undertaking: seventeen kilometres return, five to six hours of walking, extending the popular Taranaki Falls Walk from a track head about 100 metres below Whakapapa Visitor Centre across undulating tussock country and alpine herbfield. The Department of Conservation grades the main track as intermediate, and the side trip to the Upper Lake viewpoint as advanced.

Their Māori name is Ngā Puna a Tama — the springs of Tama — though neither lake has a visible inlet or outlet. What feeds and drains them happens out of sight: water is thought to seep down through the crater floors toward the springs that source the Waihohonu Stream, which eventually reaches the Tongariro River. The half-day hike to Tama Lakes' volcanic crater waters ends at two lakes that behave less like a destination and more like a hidden stage in a much longer, underground journey.

The craters themselves are young, geologically speaking. The lower lake sits at around 1,240 metres and is the first one reached; the upper lake, at roughly 1,440 metres, is viewed rather than approached, with no formed track down to either lake's edge. Both were carved out around 11,000 years ago, in explosive, water-driven blasts that ended with a pyroclastic flow reaching up to seven and a half kilometres to the south-east. Unlike the eruptions that built Ngāuruhoe next door, the Tama vents drew on a much deeper source: a magma reservoir sitting somewhere between 28 and 35 kilometres down, reached by unusually fast ascent. What those violent origins left behind is now about as still as water gets: two quiet, startlingly blue lakes, filled by rain and runoff rather than any river.

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It's that combination — young craters, a deep magma source, and views of both Ruapehu and Ngāuruhoe with almost nothing else in the frame — that sets Tama Lakes apart from the more heavily visited walks nearby. For visitors weighing it against the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, a shorter alpine walk inside Tongariro National Park is the fairer comparison: still very much an alpine day out, just a shorter one.

The saddle between the two lakes funnels the prevailing westerly wind, giving the final approach an open, exposed feel that the forest lower down doesn't have. Past the visitor centre there's nothing added to the landscape beyond the track itself — no shelter, no facilities — just the craters, the lakes, the wind, and the two mountains that made them.

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