Haunted by history
Peter Clough spends five days traversing the historic gold miners’ track known as the Old Ghost Road.
‘If you can see the mountain it’s going to rain, if not, it’s raining already” is an apt saying about New Zealand’s weather. It is “raining already”, with no sign of easing, as my wife Nanette and I drive up Buller Gorge to start a five-day tramp along the Old Ghost Road. We arrive at Lyell car park, a flattish clearing in beech forest, with a shelter, toilets and a portal gate to the Old Ghost Road.
Old photos show Lyell in its 1880s heyday resembling a western movie set, with wooden buildings both sides of a wide street.
About 3000 people lived in Lyell and the nearby settlements of Gibbstown and Zalatown, drawn to surrounding mountains to prospect for gold. There were two local newspapers, a post office, two banks, six hotels, a police station, courthouse, brewery and school.
Lyell dwindled early in the 20th century but a hotel survived until burning down in the 1960s. In the 1970s the New Zealand Walkway Commission established new tracks and signage around such historical relics as a cemetery and quartz stamping battery.
The creation of Kahurangi National Park in 1996 included the area and the Conservation Department now manages these tracks.
About 2007, Marion Boatwright, who’d established the Rough and Tumble Lodge further north at Seddonville on the Mōkihinui River, came across a 19th century surveyors’ map that showed prospectors’ tracks pushing into the bush from both Lyell and Seddonville, and a “ghost of a road” route between them.
In his book Spirit to the Stone, which is found in each of the Old Ghost Road huts, he describes sharing this with DOC and others in the district who sensed an opportunity for increasing visitors to the area. A voluntary group was set up to investigate the feasibility of track construction along a route linking the known tracks at each end, and scout locations for huts.
An early obstacle was a planned hydroelectric dam for the Mōkihinui Gorge which would inundate some existing tracks and force the route higher, but this proposal was withdrawn.
The track was built by volunteer labour and professional contractors on the technical work. Fundraising was challenging, so when the government started supporting development of national cycle trails, the 85-kilometre Old Ghost Road was repurposed as a shared tramping and cycling track.
Opened in 2016, it is still administered by a private trust. After dropping our car keys in a lock box in the Lyell Shelter, for pick-up by a vehicle transfer service, we set off in rain from Lyell, winding through damp beech forest that cloaks the valley sides beneath mist-shrouded tops.
At intervals, information boards describe the area’s history and artefacts, such as rusting machinery and pots and kettles. Kilometre posts mark progress as we climb gently uphill.
We see other trampers heading our way on the track, and eight cyclists overtake us and disappear ahead. The track is mostly broad and gently graded, with long switchbacks to ease cyclists’ ups and downs, but it is not a smooth ride.
The gravel laid on the track is chunkier than that found on recreational cycle tracks like the Otago Rail Trail, and in numerous places the track’s surface has protruding stones too large to be removed.
After about five hours we reach the first hut at Lyell Saddle. We find others have got the wood stove roaring as we claim two bunks in the warm and snug main hut. The huts offer similar accommodation to DOC’s Great Walks, but with extra refinements. Small sleep-out cabins can be booked by groups wanting more privacy, and camping sites are also available.
On the following days the rain stops and cloud lifts as we zig-zag through the forest.
Above the bush line, we pass a wooden shelter with views across hills and valleys towards Murchison to the southeast and the Mōkihinui headwaters to the northwest. The track cuts horizontally across tussock-covered hillsides, skirting rocky outcrops.
A sign proclaims “Heaven’s Door” at one notch in the ridgeline with views on both sides. Further along we pass the “Tombstone”, a natural monolith sticking out from the mountainside. We pass more wryly-named features later, such as Lake Grim and Lake Cheerful, the Boneyard (an area of white limestone boulders), and three Suicide Slips.
Our second hut sits atop a rocky precipice next to Ghost Lake, a small tarn occupying a hollow scooped out of the mountainside. A resident volunteer ranger shows us around.
More cyclists going in both directions arrive, for as the track’s highest hut it provides a useful climax for a day’s cycling and an exhilarating ride mostly downhill the next day.
We descend past Ghost Lake then climb again to an airy ridgeline called the Skyline Track, with wide views north over a jumble of granite and mudstone mountains and east to the flat-topped limestone escarpments of the Matiri Range.
This ridge ends abruptly in a flight of 302 wooden steps that twist and turn down the hillside, which cyclists must carry their bikes up or down until a more rideable switchback route is built.
The third hut in the Stern Valley sits beside a river where paradise ducks are shepherding their black and white ducklings. The nearby grassy flat looks ideal for camping, particularly as the evening sky darkens and the moon appears through a cleft in the hills.
At 25km, the fourth day is the longest, crossing a saddle between two tributaries before joining the Mōkihinui River South Branch and heading downstream. At Mōkihinui Forks, where the river’s north and south branches converge, the valley broadens and hills recede, but the track turns west towards the last hut at the mouth of the Mōkihinui Gorge.
We catch up with the same fellow trampers at each hut in the evenings, but cyclists travel faster and can skip huts. One cyclist tells us that track widening and new fences have improved the track from when it first opened.
“It used to be very narrow in places and riding close to bare rock-faces needed a lot of care to not catch the handlebars and be knocked off.”
Other cyclists confirm that honing technical skills to overcome physical obstacles is part of the attraction. “We don’t look at the view much, too busy focusing on where the front wheel’s heading.”
On our last day the sky clouds over and early drizzle becomes rain as we follow the gorge towards Seddonville. We pass girders of an old bridge in the riverbed, another ghost of a road to Karamea, abandoned and reclaimed by bush.
Relieved to see our car in the car park, we check into the Rough and Tumble Lodge, a comfortable timber building with fittings fashioned from forest-gathered branches.
Showered, refreshed and fed on a hearty lodge meal, we rest easy as rain patters on the roof, thankful that a road envisioned by miners more than a century ago has been built to realise a new set of dreams.