Mount DOOM...

The beginning of the hike...

The hike of death. Doom is such a fitting name for this day. Okay it was totally cool at the same time but oh my gosh the hardest hike I've been on to date. Wow. The hike is actually called the Tongariro Crossing and is a 17 kilometer hike which is about 12 miles total. It only took the small amount of 10 hours to complete it. Mount Doom is actually just a mountain that quite close to the beginning of the hike. And it's real name is Mount Ngauruhoe .So the day started with us waking up at about 5:30 am and getting to the start of the hike at around 6:30 am. The beginning of the hike is super easy and nice and flat and your walking with mountains on either side of you and it's green but more brown and bush like. So then we start going up a little bit steeper of a hill and you start getting lava rock around you and then bam! your at Mount Doom. The deal with the mountain was that if you wanted to you could summit it, climb to the top, and then come back down. Sounds easy no? Ha. Not. First the summit is about 45 degrees all the way up on lava rock and this super fine sand that you take one step forward and slide about 3 seps back. Let's just say the part in Lord of the Rings when Frodo and Sam are trying to climb up the mountain and they have such looks of anguish on their face? Yeah that part required no acting on their part. However the mountain is covered in lava rock which is pretty cool. I also took brought my sister's "one ring" from Lord of the Rings on this adventure with me and had some fun taking pictures on Mount Doom with the ring. It made hiking the Mountain of DEATH totally worth it.

Resist the power of the RING!!

So after we hike Mount Doom we still had about 3/4's of the hike left to finish. We went from the lava rock of Mount Doom to another really mountain that you could see where the lava had dried up. It has these awesome folds of lava rock in the mountain.

Then you go down a big empty crater and then up another mountain. (Ouch) and then you come to these very neat pools of sulfur water. They are crystal clear and blue. Very beautiful.

Then we walked some more on more dry barren lava type landscape. Towards the end of the hike the scenery started to change into dry fields of grass which was entirely different from what we'd seen earlier in the day.

Then the hike ends and you end up in literally this rain forest for the last hour of the hike. It was incredible to go from lava rock and dry to this lush green forest.

So that was Mount Doom.