Getting cooked atop Mt Albert

The story of how I came to resemble a lobster in the January Auckland sun yesterday started shortly before Christmas, when a local telly programme production company contacted me to ask how folks can research the history of their property. When they realised that's what I do for a crust, they then asked if they could interview me. For a telly programme. I said, "Sure, why not?", fairly well sure that such would never happen.

Well, it did. And yesterday, it involved sitting atop Mt Albert/Owairaka, at the Owairaka Domain, while answering questions. The photo above is of the trig station at the top of the mountain (one of Auckland's extinct and badly worn away volcanic cones). Below, a boulder I'll talk about in a moment. I was sitting in the long grass and weeds, for an hour plus, down below and to the right side of that boulder, roughly.

Not the telly production peoples' fault I was sitting there so long and came home with fiery face. It was necessary to wait for the police helicopter to quit doing slow turns around the mountain, and the police were there because the time of the recording for the programme just happened to be when two deaths were discovered in Stilwell Road, just down from the mountain.

Anyway -- I thought that if I'm up there all that time, I'd get something for the blog while I was at it. Sadly, it looks like I'm too late for whatever might have been fixed to the bluestone boulder. By the looks of it, something was there, but it isn't anymore.

There is an interpretive panel for the Maori heritage of the mountain -- but I'd like to see something telling people about the ballast pit up here, the way the cone was carved away for roading all around the district, more on the reservoirs up here (and their link with the aquifer system which stretches right through to Pt Chevalier). Stuff like that. Maybe that's what the missing sign on the rock said. I just don't know.