– an inspirational story of can-do
waking up to another day of walking the Old Ghost Road and this is something everyone should do if they like to have joy in their lives. What a marvellous thing has been made in the wilderness of the West Coast. It was just an idea, a line traced on a map in the gold-rush 19th century, now made real with timber and gravel and energy and determination and national cycle trail money and Lotto grants.
Here is something to do right now if you’re looking for a marvellous story of inspiration. Get yourself a copy of Spirit to the Stone – building the Old Ghost
Road, and read how a bunch of guys, including Weasel, Stacky, Phil, Paul, and Wayne the chopper pilot managed in just a few short years to build the country’s longest continuous walking track and a little piece of magic.
Here’s my favourite part of the story. People had tried and failed in the gold rush days to push past the eight-mile dray track at the beginning of the imaginary road to settlements further north. The challenge was to find a way to wind through river gullies that seemed impassable.
Some way into the planning, with a lot of work already done, the project hit a block wall at this exact point, and spirits were low. But then Wayne the chopper pilot says, ‘‘well, instead of going down into the valleys why not go over the top? Let’s scout it.’’ Into the chopper they get, over the Lyell range they go, and into the plans comes a completely new conception of the track.
That chopper flight changed everything, and this is a lesson we can never stop learning: great possibilities always exist from taking a fresh look and tilting the picture a little bit sidewards.
Facebook’s greatest harm is to reinforce the beliefs and misconceptions you already hold and consolidate into groups of like-minded people. There is nothing so dangerous as a herd mentality, and there is also no greater impediment to fresh thinking.
On the Old Ghost Road, you see more changes in our breathtaking landscape than you could have ever thought possible and you also see what can happen when half a dozen people get seized with an idea and just keep thinking it through until they find a way to turn a pencil line into 85,000 metres of solid joy.
On that walk and in those huts you live the tramping experience where many different people find a way to live together for a night even if they’re not the least bit like-minded.
You might call it a Facebook antidote.
Great possibilities always exist from taking a fresh look and tilting the picture a little bit sidewards.