UNEASY NOTE BOOM! UNEASY NOTE LINGERS Won't be that many more of those, you know. CONTEMPLATIVE MUSIC ENGINE RUMBLES Oh, we've just caught sight of the other team. Yeah, only after about eight or so years. Finally there. I guess the Old Ghost Road's pretty much finished. It is an achievement. There's no doubt about that. So, the Old Ghost Road. 85km. $5.9 million to build. 110,000 construction hours. 26,500 volunteer hours to date. 16 new bridges to complement the existing one bridge, so 17 in total. Four brand-new huts to go with the two existing huts. I dunno. I'd say half of the annual production of the Speights brewery has probably been consumed here. It's been the greatest thing I've ever done. It's a work of art. It's a work` It's a gift to the universe. But we've given, um, sometimes too much. REFLECTIVE MUSIC Copyright Able 2016 EASY-GOING GUITAR MUSIC INSIDE: Hello! Wease? You home? Come on in! Hey! Good to see ya, fella. I've just pulled out the old map. Somewhere in the beginning of 2007 ` goodness knows I don't remember the exact date ` there was a knock on the door. A fella, who introduced himself as Ron Humphries, had an old folded map in his hand, and lo and behold, it was an original survey for a proposed gold-miner's road from Lyell on the Buller River all the way through to right here, um, in Seddonville and Mokihinui; the mouth of the Mokihinui River. We had no clue how much of this surveyed road had actually been built, so I called on a bushman mate who I had just recently made the acquaintances of ` Steve Stack, Stacky ` and said, 'Stacky, what is this? What do you know about this country?' He didn't have a clue, so he and I set out to figure it out. On the 7th of July of 2007, Stacky and I set about to do the darn expedition. We started at Lyell at daybreak, and six days later ended up right here on this deck. Stacky and I, just, were following the old track. I remember, uh, when we came through here those years ago, thinking, hoping, that this track was` it's just gonna last, you know. That we would end up way, way down the south branch still on this track. So this was about the end of it here, Weasel. It's about it. We thought maybe it was just a slip, but we searched around the other side, and no track to be found. It was astounding country. The track had not been built from Lyell Saddle to Mokihinui Forks. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Abject wilderness. We knew there was a huge task ahead if anything were to be done. I think at that point we decided that we might, you know, mark a bit of track, and hopefully people would start using it. We weren't thinking mountain bikes then. We were just thinking a tramping route. I'm Jamie Nicoll and, yeah, from, uh, Nelson, NZ. I'm a professional cyclist, and I've been racing the Enduro World Series the last four years, and, um, out for a day to capture some of, uh, what the Ghost Road is. SUBDUED ELECTRONICA MUSIC ELECTRONICA MUSIC CONTINUES Everyone's just astounded at the job the guys have done, you know. It just sounds like it's been done with so much camaraderie and, um, fellowship, you know, and it's so cool to see that groups of people have gotten together and produced something like this. SPOKES WHIRR STACKY: Weasel's the guy that had all the enthusiasm. I think he was one of the main driving forces behind the whole thing. I think without his enthusiasm, we wouldn't have got this far. WEASEL: Phil is, uh, the chairman of the trust; the political, savvy mover and shaker that keeps all the pieces working together. WAYNE: Stacky is just the quintessential, immovable force. PHIL: Stacky was the man on the ground doing that work. He had a lot of good bush sense. He knew what he was doing. WEASEL: Wayne Pratt is one of the country's grandest helicopter operators. He knows how to work the logistics. He knows how to find an answer. c HELICOPTER ENGINE HUMS It'll be very very few people who ever came around here prior to this track being put in. It is` It is real wilderness here. In fact, probably the only times I've flown here before we started on the tract was looking for people that were lost. Very rugged. Um, just mountain range after mountain range. Um, an interesting thing here is the damage from the earthquakes. We had two major earthquakes here ` the '29 Murchison earthquake and the '68 in Inangahua. Amazing amount of damage done, um, particularly with the area we call the boneyard. It wouldn't have been a nice place to be on the day. Just huge rocks the size of houses had basically been thrown off the side of the hill. FAST-PACED TECHNO MUSIC MUSIC CONTINUES MUSIC CONTINUES MUSIC FADES The Old Ghost Road is situated in the northern part of the West Coast of the South Island. It's a narrow strip between the Southern Alps and the Tasman Sea. It is criss-crossed by fast-flowing rivers, has some lovely lakes, and 80% of the West Coast is managed by the Department of Conservation. So it's a sparsely populated, scenically stunning region of NZ. Every one of the 85,000m that this track traverses is on public conservation land. I'm Bob Dickson, and I'm the local operations manager for the Department of Conservation based in Westport, and we operate across the entire Buller district. Bob Dickson is one of the finest civil servants this country's ever had. He could have said no. He could have said, 'I can't be bothered.' But he gave us the room to create this. You know, seeing our work in the Lyell, he came to realise the value of, at first, I think, probably just restoring the Lyell track. It just slowly dawned on him that we were pretty determined and audacious and, um, weren't gonna stop until we were told to. (CHUCKLES) And so he never told us to, um, but, boy, we toed the line, cos it's his precious DOC estate. So, these guys weren't the first ones who wanted to build a trail that connected the Lyell with the Seddonville gold fields. 140 years ago, that piece of work had already been planned and mapped, but it was about how you made the connections. And so, the trust, when it was formed, brought together a range of skills which all complemented one another. And that formed the nucleus of a really top team. Gonna be heading up to the Lyell Saddle part. It'll be our first effort for the day. Quite excited about it, actually, yeah. Steve. Gidday, mate, how ya going? Hey, mate. Phil was the man that came up with the notion of turning it into a mountain-bike track. It found good success in the Lyell, and we were thinking we might just stop there at the Lyell Saddle when Stacky got word that this organisation called the NZ Cycle Trail was accepting applications and had a $50 million pot of money. So, uh, almost on a dare, I put in an application for it. We were blown away when, uh, they came back and said, 'You're` You're on our list of acceptances,' basically, and, uh, in fact, we were top of the list. Personally, that's when reality hit, so we needed to be so much more than just infected keen... in the weekend, and we needed to step up with the right systems, structures and delivery methods to, um` to bring this in. We'd just gone from hopeless dreamers, getting by on $20 here and $20 there, to just, sort of, feed some volunteers with some sausages with our little weekend outfits. Yeah, this just took us into the stratospheric level of big time, big project, so it was game on. It is an absolutely wonderful achievement to have created this 84km of single track through pristine wilderness in the top half of the West Coast of the South Island. The amount of effort, uh, the inspiration, the vision that the people who are behind the Old Ghost Road have shown has been absolutely fantastic. The` The big thing for us in here was learning how to build track, you know. We` We knew nothing. Talk about a crash course in learning something from` from nothing. Uh, yeah, about half an hour, we'll load the holes and fire a shot, yeah. Gidday, I'm Jim. Jim McIlraith. So, Jim started way back at the beginning, pretty much organising all of our field operations. The first thing that has to happen is the track needs to be marked out. That involves actually going out on the ground and translating a computer-generated line, uh, into reality. The first, uh, pass through is basically with vegetation clearing, uh, the use of chainsaws, so you actually cut ahead of where the excavator goes, and then the excavator works, and they're continually working to the` to the taped lines. As soon as they reach a piece of ground that they can't move with the excavator, then we'll assess it for` for what it's gonna take, and then they'll drill and blast. Oh, just loading some rocks. Hopefully it breaks it up enough that a 1.5-ton digger can get through. Yeah, I spent a few months here. Stacky is about, uh, 150 nights in arrears for hut fees. LAUGHTER How many nights? When we got up onto the Lyell range, we put in a prefabbed hut, and three of us lived out of there until it snowed. You couldn't sustain a track-building programme living out of tents, especially through the winter. Oz kind of led the hut-building effort. We` The whole game was to build huts faster than Stacky can build track. We'd fly in with a month's worth of food, beer and all the materials to build the hut and get the job done. We'll show you the summer sleep-outs. We did 'em to hark back to the old days of, um, mining camps. They're, um, perfect for a couple or family or four guys travelling together. So, you're a little bit of space away from the snores in the main hut. It was a slow start that wound up to quite a` (CHUCKLES) quite a massive rolling front. And so when they got to the lower saddle and the hut was built, it's, 'where to from here?' And, of course, they couldn't go down the south branch because the creeks had blown out, and that's when the challenges really started. This is what it's all about. This is the anvil that started it all. LAUGHTER The old-timers left it right at the end of the track about 150m round this ridge here. To us, it just kind of seemed like a symbol. When the anvil broke, you could just kind of feel 'em saying, well, f... you know, 'Why are we doing this any more? The gold boom's gone bust already. 'They don't wanna pay us any more to do this stuff. Let's go back to Lyell.' The south branch had stopped the old-timers, and, uh, it wanted to stop us. You'd always drop them off, and they're full of enthusiasm. When you picked them up, sometimes, they were just beaten, you know. You could just see that they` they were concerned that, uh, it wasn't gonna work. Some dark times, eh, you know. Yeah. We were kind of on our knees, and the Old Ghost Road was probably just gonna end here. It wasn't until this chap here turned up that day that, um, we saw a third option, which is, well, you can go on ` it's just not down there, and it's not back there, but it's up behind us. And so it was back to the drawing board. Where do we go from here? And the only way was up, and that was across the Lyell Range, down through Stern Creek, over in to Goat Creek and back out to link up with the south branch at Goat Creek and then down through the Mokihinui Gorge. That's what they've done, and I'll have to say, it's exemplary. Some of the work that they've put into that and the challenges they've faced and the solutions they've sought really have been taxing, but they've risen to the challenge, and they've done it. They've done it well. STACKY: Well, I knew it wasn't gonna be easy. The` The lower part up through the lower part of the, uh, Mokihinui, past the Forks was obviously quite doable, but the area we're in right now from here on was the area that was always gonna give everyone a lot of trouble. WEASEL: Getting out of the bush and getting on to those tops just changed everything. I'd always thought about going on the tops. I'd been involved with a few tracks. It just adds to much to it if it has an alpine section. It looked really straightforward from the helicopter. LAUGHTER The price of being epic. The journey feeling works really well, coming from the` down in the valley and climbing up to eventually above the bushline here at Ghost Lake, and, um, you move on from here, and you go through some ancient slip areas, and so it's, uh, you really feel like you're travelling through a no-man's land, and eventually through to that more lush, uh, West Coast gorge and the river there and, you know, there's swing bridges going along beside the river and all sorts, so, you know, it's` it just has a really great transition, and it really gives you that feeling of, uh, a journey and an` an adventure. Awesome day for me. Beautiful country, uh, lovely people, you know. You just meet so many different people when you're out biking. Good to run into a couple of friends up here that were tramping too. RELAXED MUSIC PHIL: You know, this project has ridden on the shoulders of two groups. Um, first and foremost, Stacky and his colleagues ` so, the guys that are in here day in, day out through thick and thin, rain, hail, shine, snow, mud ` and then our volunteers. And the army are volunteers who have done just an incredible amount of work. Over here, all of this was done by hand. It was done by Wease and his volunteers. PHIL: In one summer alone, just over two and a half months, 5500 hours of volunteer time poured in by people from all over the world that just thought, 'What a great way to spend a summer.' I lived at Ghost Lake Hut from the 1st of December till the 28th of February, um, working with up to 16 volunteers at a time. Uh, some 'em came for two days; some of 'em came for two months. And we were just like a Disney movie army of, uh, dwarfs going off to work every day with our axes thrown over our shoulders to, uh, carve this trail by hand down off the alpine country. In the Ghost Lake Basin, you know, blasting ` not an option. We were smashing boulders with hammers. We were digging, um, 15 people lined up in a stretch of 15m of track, each working their own little individual metre through the, uh` down to good ground to carve a track that line. And, um, it's just an amazing sense of accomplishment. The NZ Cycle Trail started just after the Global Financial Crisis. The government injected $50 million to kick-start the construction of 22 great rides around NZ. PHIL: It was only ever meant to be some seed funding, you know. It was never gonna be everything we needed. That's been the hallmark of the project again ` it's just some outstanding funding organisations that have worked with us, that have listened, have seen the vision and bought into it. WEASEL: People wanna be part of this. It's a romantic endeavour. We needed some money to try and join this gap that's up behind us. You know, we'd played all of our cards. We` We did this crowdfunding, uh, exercise and were absolutely blown away. More than $100,000 raised over those six weeks from people from all parts of the world and all walks of life that just bought into it. And it's enabled us to complete this trail. MACHINERY HUMS, CLATTERS October 28, 2015. Here we are at the, uh, south-west end of Solemn Saddle for the kissing of diggers. Feel kind of steady, kind of OK. I walked around this corner right here, saw those two diggers and just... burst out in tears. It's an incredible moment. This is the last shot on the Old Ghost Road. She's done and dusted, mate. What? < BOOM! < EXPLOSION RUMBLES RAIN PATTERS SOFTLY GENTLE PIANO MUSIC It's surreal. It's weird. It's weird thinking that now I've gotta go and do something else, you know. It's all over. Well, it's been a magnificent project. It's been huge. It's been ambitious. It's probably the largest, biggest back-country trailblazing project that we've seen in NZ for many, many years. And without a doubt, it's gonna be a great success. GENTLE PIANO MUSIC CONTINUES Mate, it's awesome. It's just` It's just a great place, eh? It's just epic. Epic. So cool. I'm really looking forward to it. So, last year, we had our first cycling Enduro event, where the Buller Cycle Club, working with the trust, were able to facilitate this incredible experience, flying the bikes up on to the alpine tops, biking back out. It's the kind of thing we wanna see more of, and it's great we've now reached the point where it's open. But now the hard work starts, because now we've gotta make sure that people use it. That we have to market it as a destination, and we have to get a commercial return from it in order to maintain it. I think the Old Ghost Road is right up there at the top end of experiences. Uh, the quality of the trail is very very high. The huts are good, and the terrain and scenery are second to none. So I think we will see a lot of international visitors come to NZ specifically to ride the Old Ghost Road. The scale of the project shouldn't be underestimated. These people have made history. They've connected up two long-forgotten ends of a ghost trail. So when we look back over the years to come, I think people'll be pretty proud of what they've achieved. Anyone who's reasonably fit can go through here and have a good time and any, you know, good rider who enjoys, like, challenges of riding is gonna find parts in it for them as well. So, you know, on a world stage, this is gonna be something unique, and I think it will be a drawcard and a bucket list for a lot of people to come here and see, you know, what it's all about. Word of mouth is very powerful, and getting the positive word of mouth that we're receiving on the Old Ghost Road means more people will come; more money will be spent; more jobs will be created. It's a very very good thing for the region. I have no doubt in my mind that it's the` it's the greatest, um, project I've ever been involved with, and` and personally, one of the ` easily one of the most significant things I've ever done in my life or been involved with. The real work's actually ahead of us, and, so, you know, we are` I'm excited, you know. There's just so much we don't know that we know that we need to solve and think creatively and innovatively about, and I'm really looking forward to that. It's just the next chapter. It's been one adventure building it, but now sharing it with the world is a whole other thing. It's, um, incredibly exciting because, always, the track is` is just an avenue into this country that we've fallen in love with. And, um, we know that tens of thousands of people are now going to have the opportunity to fall in love with it. UPBEAT MUSIC UPBEAT MUSIC CONTINUES Well done, love. (LAUGHS) There you go. Awesome, guys. Awesome. Well done, mate. 10 out of 10, mate. Yeah. Awesome. It was amazing, yep. Yeah, we'll be back. Captions by Alana Drayton. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016