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:
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“These, then, will be some of the features of democracy ... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, particolored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)