Waitakere Ranges Regional Park
Rainforest of ancient kauri trees, black-sand beaches, and waterfall-laced walking tracks.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Waitakere Ranges Regional Park in Auckland begins with a trained dog sniffing through the forest for a soil pathogen, and traces it back to the ancient kauri, trees already centuries old when Auckland was founded. It covers the timber era, when twenty-three sawmills and about seventy dams stripped some hundred twenty thousand kauri from these ranges before the industry ran out of forest in the 1920s. It follows the moment in March 2006 when a scientist first noticed something wrong with a mature kauri here, and how researchers traced the disease's spread along the very tracks you might be walking now.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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