Building an Icon
“The track gets a little longer each day but always ends at a pile of windfall or tangled, West Coast bush. It’s hard, dangerous work.”
I’m walking through an area of ‘goblin forest’ on the Paparoa Track with a Department of Conservation Ranger. This is New Zealand’s newest Great Walk and the first to be purpose-built for shared use—tramping and mountain biking. The trees around us are gnarled and twisted, with bright green moss clinging to every surface. Native birds like tomtits and fantails flit through the low canopy above. It’s cold, grey and wet; today we are literally up inside the clouds.
The ranger listens to chatter on her hand-held radio as we walk along. “They’re about to set off a charge,” she says.
We hear the countdown. “Five, four, three, two, one…” Then silence. Just as the ranger starts to explain that we must be too far away to hear the explosive, there’s a ‘KABOOM!’ that shakes the ground around us even though we’re several kilometres from the blasting site. Somewhere up in the distant hills, track construction crews have gained a few more hard-won metres through
