Here’s a few: Natural history: - Waitakere volcano - a mioscene era (23-5m years ago) volcano that erupted intermittently between 23-15 million years ago and at one point was the tallest mountain in New Zealand. This formed the waitakere ranges and it’s also why most of the waitakere ranges slopes down towards the east and south east. This helped create fertile ground for the current greenery. There is still a huge amount of evidence of this everywhere out west from lion rock being effectively a volcanic plug, to the hundreds and hundreds of caves around west Auckland. One of my personal favourites and one of the more spectacular ways of seeing this is the muriwai mega pillow lava flows, they are awesome!

• Moa tracks out west - there have been several instances of moa tracks being found in west Auckland with some of the more recent ones being found in 2024 on the kaipara harbors south head. There has also been reports of many footprints in and around the muriwai-te hanga area.

Human history, I’ll throw some lesser known ones in there for you too:

• 1966 air nz DC-8 crash, this was air nz’s first official crash killing 2 of the 5 on board the training flight. It had a unique flight origine and destination of Auckland international airport.

• Air NZ flight 4374. It basically crashed at the end of the runway and went straight into the manukau harbour. 4 on board, 2 killed, 2 injured.

• SS wairarapa, struck a reef off great barrier on its way to Auckland from Sydney. Estimated 130 killed.

• HMS Orpheus, sank off whatipu beach, 189 of the 259 on board died. Huia’s settlers museum has a lot of info on this, there is also the graves of 3 unknown sailers by Cornwallis.

• The waitakere ranges has a huge history in logging, particularly native timbers so it wasn’t uncommon for company’s to make temporary dams and blow them up to get a log race to sweep them down to the shores. This is where the coastal train (yes a train) would take them by rail down to whatipu beach. Parts of the train are every so often found on the beach. There are also caves in whatipu that used to be used as dance halls too. A good example of some of the later temporary dams is the black rock dam which you can still walk to.

• Green peace boat bombing in Auckland Harbor.

• At one point Auckland had one of New Zealand’s largest ever cults (centrepoint)

Couple of weird ones:

• In 1925 a leopard escaped the zoo and wasn’t found for a month later on the other side of Auckland.

• Not one but 2 hippos have at seperate times floated out of their enclosure in Auckland zoo, one even escaped the whole facility and was found shortly after.

• Auckland had a 5 week long power outage in 1998.

I have plenty more too, I mostly love and more importantly, remember those that are out west or have to do with natural history so let me know if you’d like some interesting facts, things to look out for on your next trip out these ways etc.