CONQUERNG MY FEARS
This was a story I never intending writing. The Waikaia Bush Road is no more a ‘road’ than the Stairway to Heaven made famous by the band Led Zeppelin. It’s a rough-as-guts 4WD track that strikes fear into the hearts of relatively novice solitary 4WDers and campers such as myself. It leads from Piano Flat in Southland to a number of locations in Central Otago, but the most common exit is onto SH8 between Roxburgh and Alexandra where a remarkably ordinary and benign-looking yellow and black sign points up what looks like a pretty standard New Zealand country gravel road, giving no hint of what lies just around the corner.
At its highest point, the track reaches 1400 metres so it’s hardly Mount Everest territory, but along the tops the weather can change from calm and balmy to life-threatening in (almost) the blink of an eye.
It is dangerous. People have died. Thirty gold miners died in this vicinity when they were caught in a blizzard. More recently 38 people – men, women and children – had to be rescued when their 4WD convoy got stuck in heavy snow across the tops after they ignored strong ‘bad weather is on the way’ signs.
But it’s not just snow that can cause trouble for adventurers. Across the tops of what is basically the Old Man Range, there are a lot of boggy patches that can swallow the entire annual production of the Land Rover factory and still have room for the Red Army tank fleet. The standard advice for novices like the person at this end of the keyboard is ‘don’t’. You need support and gear.
About 20 years ago, I gave it half a thought. I was camping at the very end of Piano Flat in the lee of the southern end of the track, the weather was fine, the track hard and fast as they say in horseracing and I had my brave and brand new little Suzuki Jimny that, so far, had not been stopped by anything on the trip down from Auckland, via as many back roads and trails as I could find.
The track started off vertically – and then got steeper! After about 15 minutes of low range, low gear grunting and covering maybe 300 metres I gave up when we came to a washout wide enough and deep enough to swallow the Jimny.
That was when I realised the truth behind the
