Another blog in my series looking at some of the best routes in my book and nearby towns and centres that make an ideal base. This time – East Otago and the town of Cromwell.
Shaped by its climatic extremes and also by the picks and shovels of miners, East Otago is a regular theme park of 4WD adventures. You can head west to rainforest at the head of Lake Wakatipu or east to parched tussocklands around Alexandra. Or you can sample the extreme, with this book’s most challenging routes, along the top of Old Man Range. You can savour the isolation of the Nevis Valley, then plug back into civilisation in the shops and restaurants of Queenstown. Or you can avoid Queenstown completely – its streets have plenty of flash four-wheel-drives but they stay pretty shiny. Cromwell is more central to the routes, well-serviced with accommodation and supplies, and they don’t mind a muddy truck or two in the main street.
If you do only one trip in this area, make it the road to the old settlement of Macetown, up the Arrow River. When William Fox struck gold in the Arrow Gorge in 1862, prospectors poured into the area. Townships sprang up at either end of the gorge: Fox’s, later to be called Arrowtown, and at the northern end Twelve Mile, later Macetown.
While Arrowtown still thrives, Macetown had a shorter history, falling victim to the harsh climate, its isolation and the decline of mining. In the 1860s its population numbered 3000 but by 1906 mining operations had ceased.
Now it is a ghost town of tumbledown walls and chimneys, lent a more tragic air by the groves of trees the miners planted to soften their setting. Sycamores, cottonwoods, poplars and hawthorns grace the once treeless terrace that was a main street of stores, smithies, hotels and cottages.
Three buildings remain intact, and the bakehouse and Needham’s Cottage have had their exteriors restored. The buildings, together with all other relics in the township and surrounds, are now protected in a 145ha historic reserve.
Another testament to the lure of gold is the Skippers Canyon route up the Shotover River. Quite dizzying in its twisting contortions, the narrow, unfenced road to the mining town of Skippers Canyon is an engineering feat that still commands respect. It took 20 years’ labour and many lives lost to punch through a route to supply the miners working what the Otago Witness had proclaimed “the richest river in the world”. Each square foot of the Shotover’s bed was said to hold almost an ounce of gold.
The canyon’s original narrow tracks were woefully inadequate for getting supplies through to the miners, who by the mid-1860s numbered nearly 10,000, spread along the 22km from Skippers Saddle to the remotest reaches of the canyon. The provincial government finally bowed to pressure and surveying for a road began in July 1863.
With many miners already failing to realise their dreams and scores more Chinese immigrants seeking work, there was no shortage of labour. They worked with picks and shovels in miserable conditions and built the road you can drive today.
Pinchers Bluff was the most difficult section: it took more than two years to cut the 274m of road from sheer rock face. Chinese labourers were lowered down the face and with hammer and chisel they chipped out sections for small dynamite charges to be laid.
If you think Skippers sounds scary, the side route to The Branches Station offers twice the fear factor, as well as yet more spectacular scenery and views of old gold workings and buildings.
The Nevis Valley is another of the area’s highlights. From Cromwell, a day trip will take you south along the edge of Lake Wakatipu to Garston, then over the southern end of the Hector Mountains to the Nevis Valley. The route follows the single rocky channel of the Nevis River through a high V-shaped gorge between the Hector and Garvie mountains.
Streams feed the river from the mountains on either side, fretting the landscape and giving you 31 crossings. Water-races from mining days wind down the valley sides. Spiny wild spaniard, with its menacing sharp spears, grows in thick clumps along the way.
From Nevis Crossing the road climbs steeply to Duffers Saddle, between the Carrick and Old Woman ranges, giving views of the surrounding Hector and Garvie mountains, and a view of the “back” of The Remarkables to the west. From there it’s a steep drop to the old mining centre of Bannockburn, and then back to Cromwell.
Many of the routes in this book can be tackled safely in a single, minimally equipped 4WD. At the other end of the scale are the network of routes along the top of the Old Man Range, from Old Man Rock in the north to Piano Flat in the south-west and Mt Benger in the south-east.
This area is a tangle of 4WD routes – Aitchison Runs Road, Coal Creek Road, Pomahaka Road, Southern Old Man Range, Waikaia Bush Road and the toughest of all, Whitecoomb Road. Getting stuck is inevitable, and you might need more than one truck to get you out, so Whitecoomb Road should be tackled only by experienced off-roaders travelling in convoy and with full recovery gear.
Deep waterholes along the track contain a lot of suspended solids and require considerable skill to drive through. Rain, hail and snow can blast up from the south at any time of the year – in August 1863 such a storm claimed the lives of at least 30 of a party of 200 goldminers. If you get stuck and the weather turns bad, you may not get out alive.
Less life-threatening but still dramatic is the gravel road that leads from SH8 to Old Man Rock. At 26.8m high, Old Man Rock is the largest of the pinnacles that break the ridgelines all along the Old Man Range. Ngai Tahu legend has it that the rock is the petrified form of the giant Kopuwai, who lived nearby with his 10 two-headed dogs. In retribution for his having captured a young girl from the Te Rapuiwi tribe, a warrior party trapped Kopuwai and clubbed him to death. His dogs were transformed into stone formations along the Clutha River.
