Tongariro Alpine Crossing

We'd planned on doing the 16km trek across Tongariro National Park, we enquired about getting the shuttle at Taupo i-Site (Visitor Information Centre) as we were told that car theft is rampant in the National Park Car park, we were told it's not advised to do the alpine trek at this time of year if you've never done one before and further to that someone died on the trek last night, so that idea was scrapped. We booked our white water rafting and decided to do the volcanic loop drive instead of the trek. I done about three quarters of the 80km journey when heavy fog and snow started to fall so we decided against going any further we did see what we went out in the first place which was the beautiful snow capped mountains.