AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Kaimai-Mamaku Forest Park — managed by New Zealand's Department of Conservation as the Kaimai Mamaku Conservation Park — is a vast, forested wall of ranges that folds between the Bay of Plenty and the Waikato. Stretching from the dramatic Karangahake Gorge in the north down almost to Rotorua, it is stitched together by more than 360 km of walking and tramping tracks that wind through some of the country's most botanically unusual bush.↗
What draws people in is the park's dual character: it is simultaneously a wilderness of kauri groves and ridgelines, and an open-air museum of New Zealand's gold-mining and kauri-logging past. Visitors come to walk a historic saddle route over the Kaimai crest, to follow the original rails of the country's oldest bush tramway, or simply to listen for tui and bellbirds echoing through forest where the mighty kauri meets its southern limit.
A range that split two regions
For early Māori inhabitants and later European settlers, the Kaimai range was a hard barrier between the Bay of Plenty and Waikato, crossed only by rough routes that were later widened into access tracks for the logging and gold industries. The land itself is dramatic: the high northern Kaimai is built of ancient volcanic rock thrust up along the Hauraki fault line and draped in a sheet of ignimbrite, while to the south the flat Mamaku plateau is a single slab of the same volcanic rock, erupted from the site of today's Lake Rotorua some 140,000 years ago.
