Auckland Council’s regional parks team has now completed more than forty-four damaged track renewals over the past two years and is moving into a busy summer of further work, with bridge builds at Piha, a major upgrade of the gannet colony viewing area at Muriwai, and restoration of the popular Lake Wainamu loop at Bethells Beach all running in parallel.
Regional Parks Manager Scott De Silva told OurAuckland that people love getting out and about in these special places, and that the council’s role was to ensure their experience was a great one. Most of the projects on his desk this year trace back either to the catastrophic Auckland Anniversary floods and Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023, or to the small but intense fire that swept through part of the Fairy Falls Track in November 2025.
Lake Wainamu, on the back road to Bethells Beach, has been one of the most difficult sites. The 6.9 kilometre loop track was hit by seven separate slips during the 2023 weather events, with sections of the path simply peeling off the slope into the bush below. The shorter return walk from the car park out to the lake itself reopened in 2025, allowing visitors to swim at Wainamu Falls and walk among the nikau palms and native scrub, but the full loop has remained closed while engineers work out how to rebuild around the damaged ground. Council expects the rest of the track to reopen in time for summer.
Over in Piha, the Knutzen Track is getting two new bridges. The original crossing was washed downstream in a flash flood in early 2023 and the river has shifted since, so the replacement is being designed to carry walkers across both the main channel and a second stream feeding in from Glen Esk. The first new bridge is due to arrive on site shortly, with the second to follow later in the year.
The biggest single landscape project this year is at Muriwai. The Maukatia Gannet Track has been in stages of renewal for some time, and the final stage, including a replacement viewing platform at the northern end, is timed to go in once the seabirds have finished nesting. The Maukatia colony is the largest mainland gannet colony in the country, and the platform is the only place most visitors will ever stand close to nesting tākapu in their lives. Council has signalled there will be temporary closures across the second half of 2026 while the new structure goes in.
A few minutes down the road, Fairy Falls in the Waitākere Ranges has reopened in part after a fire damaged the lower section in November 2025. The hour-long bush walk down to the waterfall is one of the gentlest in the Waitākeres, with boardwalks and steps through regenerating kauri country. The upper viewing platform is now accessible again, although the bottom of the track remains closed while crews assess the burnt vegetation and the integrity of the path.
Not every closure has a happy ending. The summit track to the top of Lion Rock at Piha, a destination for generations of Auckland school trips, remains shut and will stay that way. Council says the rock face is too unstable after the 2023 storms, and the heritage value of the formation, including its place in local tikanga, complicates any kind of engineered intervention. Reinforced fencing is being installed this year to keep people off the summit while a longer-term plan is worked through. Two other Piha-area walks, the Laird Thomson Track on the north side and the Tasman Lookout Track on the south, have also been closed since the 2023 weather, and council is studying whether either can be re-aligned onto more stable ground.
The funding picture is still being worked out. The council’s Governing Body is due to consider another tranche of track funding at the end of June. Auckland’s wider parks, sport and outdoors work programme covers everything from playgrounds and sportsfields to coastal walkways and the Botanic Gardens, and the regional parks slice of that is competing with renewals at places such as Ambury Regional Park and the Auckland Domain.
The track work is happening alongside a much bigger effort at native landscaping in Auckland. Council’s Plant More Natives campaign opens its annual seedling giveaway in June, with community nurseries from Devonport to Bethells Beach handing out free kōwhai, kānuka, māhoe, pōhutukawa and other natives to anyone willing to put them in the ground at home. The aim is to lift Auckland’s overall tree canopy cover from around 18 per cent to 30 per cent under the council’s Ngahere Strategy. Pourewa in Orakei, the Kaipātiki Project in Birkdale, Matuku Link out at Bethells and the Auckland Botanic Gardens in Manurewa are among the participating nurseries.
For visitors planning a winter or summer walk, council recommends checking the regional parks page on the website before driving out, because plenty of tracks across the Waitākere and Hunua ranges still carry partial or full closures, especially after rain. Operators are also reminding people to follow rāhui and biosecurity rules around kauri dieback, which has shaped much of the boardwalk and gravel work being done across the network.
What’s your favourite walk in the Auckland regional parks, and which one are you most keen to see reopen? Drop a comment below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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