Our Local Mountain

The mountain influences the lives of the people of the area in many ways. For people living in the village of Pirongia it shelters them from the worst of the prevailing westerlies. For the farmers on its slopes, its terrain, (and the effect of the terrain on the climate), influences the way they farm the land. For the children in the school, the mana of the mountain influences their entire education. The teachers use the mountain as a kind of guiding beacon to build their programmes around, in the hope that no matter how far afield those children may travel in their lives they will never forget their mountain beginnings and will always live by the principles they learnt growing up beside it. The school motto "Together We Climb" refers to the mountain. The school logo, flag and gateway all bear its image as do indoor and outdoor murals and almost every classroom wall in the school. The school's guiding story, also called "Together We Climb" uses an ascent of Pirongia as an analogy of an education (or a life) and is published here on our page of the same name.

Businesses around Pirongia carry a mountain image on their signs and people who have travelled far away from the district often carry pictures of it to remind them of home.

We in the district know that you can look at it a dozen times a day and see a different mountain every time.

An example of a single day of mountain-watching, described in one sentence:
"We may awake to see its vast blackness slowly lit by the early dawn and then the sudden bright pink blush of sunrise setting its upper slopes alight while delicate swathes of mist swirl and play around the lower slopes, only to be quickly sucked away by the sun to leave the mountain shining in the full daylight with individual trees picked out bright and clear, until a sudden wild squall sweeps in from the west, obscuring the peaks, shrouding the slopes with driving rain, strafing the foothills with lightning, before suddenly departing, leaving the mountain shining and freshly washed in the sun once more, revealing its shadows lengthening as the day wears on until the sun begins to set behind it in a fiery blaze, fading slowly into night, leaving the mountain's bulk to become a dark but familiar protective mass against a starry sky."

After such day of constantly unfolding beauty, we locals drift off to sleep wondering how the mountain could ever top top such a display, but somehow we are rarely disappointed, with each day a new opportunity for visual delights from the slopes above.

The Mt Pirongia Restoration Society are the guardians of our local mountain. They protect its flora and fauna to the best of their ability. They organise the annual Mt Pirongia Art Awards to raise funds for the many costs of protecting our mountain. The Art Awards contest has become a highlight of the year and an entity in itself.

Full information about the Mt Pirongia Restoration Society, the geological history of the mountain, information about its flora and fauna and the human cultures surrounding the mountain now and in the past, is available on the society's web site here.

The paintings for the contest are submitted in two categories, the "Mountain" category (for paintings of the mountain itself)and the "Flora and Fauna" category (for paintings of the plants and animals living on the mountain). To view the paintings submitted for the Art Awards visit the society's art page here.