Taylor's Mistake Hike

 

The trail was named after the captain of the ship Hawk that wrecked on the beach here.  Poor Taylor, remembered for a bad day.

When I looked at my phone it says I climbed 99 flights of stairs today.  Oops.  I had not realized this was such a difficult hike. My coworker recommended it as a family hike that she does with her kids I knew that she had brought her kids along so it had to be doable by me on a bright and sunny New Zealand morning.

And this picture actually underestimates my climb,  because the bus dropped me off at the beach and it was another 300 foot climb to get to the trailhead.  300 feet is about 28 stories. The switchbacks need to be that spiky to get up those cliffs.

New Zealand seems to wear gorgeous like it’s a comfy t-shirt, "No big deal I’m just going to be breath-taking around every corner, just cuz it’s comfy."

The trail is an in-and-out, and there were multiple water fountains along the way, which were total lifesavers given how hot the day was.  I set an alarm for reapplying sunscreen, because there was precious little shade on the trail.  The midpoint is the beach where the Hawk wrecked in Hobson's Bay.  After climbing down many more stairs I was confronted with this sign reading "Taylors Mistake Road - The 193 Steps."

It felt like more than that.

Pretty sure this is a lava flow that became a rock--20 minutes of internet searches later, yes, there’s an extinct volcano that created the Banks Peninsula.  There are patches where the volcanic eruptions layered down rhyolite (one of my favorite ‘lites) but the beach at Taylor’s Mistake is in the basalt region. The extremely hard basalt has left boulders below the tideline, so there were tidepools and barnacles to investigate.

Not pictured, the vegan (!!!!!!) pan au chocolat that I ate with my feet in the cold Pacific Ocean. This revived me enough to do the 139 steps (and more) a second time, in reverse order.