Features
The District is landlocked, and contains Mount Ruapehu, Tongariro National Park, and the Raurimu Spiral on the North Island Main Trunk railway line.
The tourist towns of Whakapapa, National Park and Ohakune are also located here.
Waiouru, with an elevation of 815 metres, is in the extreme east of the district and houses the large Waiouru Army Camp.
The infamous Desert Road section of State Highway 1 starts in the district at Waiouru, and it passes Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe and Tongariro before ending at Rangipo.
The crater lake of Mount Ruapehu was the immediate cause of the Tangiwai disaster, with the loss of 151 lives, when the Tangiwai railway bridge across the Whangaehu River collapsed. In 2007 the lake had again filled with water, which was released on Sunday 18 March.
Read more about this topic: Ruapehu District
Famous quotes containing the word features:
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“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
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“Art is the child of Nature; yes,
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—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)