WALK SHORTS
HISTORIC REEFTON TRACK REOPENS
A 150-year-old track near Reefton has reopened after dozens of volunteers put in thousands of hours of work to clear it in commemoration of a young climber’s vision.
Jack Grinsted was working for a local tourism promotion organisation four years ago when he first learned of the 11km Painkiller Track, which ascends a ridge near the West Coast town.
He said the track was built in 1872 to access a gold-bearing quartz reef at the head of Painkiller Creek. A road was later blasted out of the rock so vehicles could access the mines. The mines were eventually abandoned and the track reopened to trampers in the 1970s, but it soon fell into disrepair and was stripped from future maps.
After talking with fellow climber and DOC ranger Sarwan Chand, Grinsted applied for funding from the Backcountry Trust to upgrade the track in 2017.
“It’s a true old ghost road,” Grinsted said. “The benching of the track was still intact, but it was heavily overgrown with
