ROADING WEKALAND.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 211, 7 September 1927, Page 6

ROADING WEKALAND.

Sir Thomas Mackenzie in his younger days did a lot of tramping and some useful exploring in the great southern fiordland, and his enthusiasm for the development of that region accounts for his reading suggestion put forward in the Legislative Council. Sir Thomas wants the Government to undertake the job of linking up the east and west aides of Otago by a wheel road via the Greenstone, Hollyford and Cleddau Rivera. Probably few of his colleagues, and very few of tb* general public, realise exactly the mpgniflrrnt dimensions of the reading task \h»* summarised. The making of the Otira transalpine highway was a trifling item by comparison with what this would involve. The Greenstone River flow* into tba west side of Lako Wakatipu, near, the head. The HoUyford flows the other way, info Lake licKerrow, at the head of Martin's Bay, north of Mil ford Sound. The Cleddau flows in still another direction, from the glaciers of Mount Tutoko, some 9000 ft high, into the head of Milford Sound. The region intervening between Wakatipu and Milford U a land of very wild and splendid landscapes, ~nd still more splendid difficulties. It is all gorge and cliff, snowy mountain and alpine torrent. Wild scenery enough to fit out a continent with tourist routes, and a tremendous land for big engineering stunts. Given a quarter or half a million or so, a genius in road making could build a wonderful tourist highway here until he came to the granite battlements of Mount Tutoko and the other aheerdowns thereabouts, and then he'd want another quarter-million to get down to the vallev of the Cleddau and so to Milford Sound. Very little really is known about that section of the suggested route. The only man who ever scakd, or partly scaled, the thousands of feet of almost vertical rock at the bead of the Cleddau, a surveyor named Quill, was killed there. That was sometime after he had climbed the tremendous precipice over which the Sutherland Fall tumble*. The only way of getting round that awful Cleddau head precipice is to pet through it; a tunnel through the granite rock whose length no man has yet estimated would be necessary. Aiyf how many other tunnels would be needed, and how much carving of roadway out of the solid rock would be necessary not' even Sir Thomas Mackenzie could say. There is a horse track of a sort, the kind the hardy West Coasters can use, between the Greenstone and that lost-and-forgotten settlement Martin's Bay. But there is no getting to Milford Sound that way. Some time, when Xew Zealand has a few scores of millions to play with, it may tackle the Mackenzie notion. But for the present the tourist will have to content himself with the tramp over McKinnon's Pass from Lake Te Anau. We shall be flying to Milford bv special tourist aeroplane long before the speedways for avalanches are tamed for motor traffic, »«yl by that time we wont need them. —TAXGIWAL