BLAZING NEW TRAILS

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 54, 7 March 1929, Page 10

BLAZING NEW TRAILS

Once again, after nigh a generation has gone, the Government has taken up seriously the roading of tho Urewera via Waikaremoana and To Whaiti, and it seems that in no long time tho Wai-roa-'Waikaremoana road on the East Coast, and the Rotorua-Te Whaiti road in tho Hot .Lakes district, will bo so connected up, via the Urewera highlands, that motor-cars will be able to run the whole length. To .form an udequato idea of this achievement one has to remember that such a motor road must span the backbone ridge of the North Island, which, north of Hawkes Bay, ia variously called the Huiarau and Raukumara Ranges, but a southern reader "will know these ranges more readily as the northward or north-east-ward continuation of tho Tararua-Rua-hino backbone. For very many years the white man had only one highway through this barrier—via the Manawatu Gorge, which Nature had so prepared for him that he had it roaded and railed before tho 'nineties. Tho second traverse was the road from Napier to Taupo, the third was Gisborne-Motu-Opotiki (Bay of Plenty),- and the fourth will be Wairoa-Waikaremoana-To Whaiti-Rotorua; all these aro high level roads not yet highways in the Manwatu* sense. At the Wellington end, roads have been thrown across the straggling offshoots of the Tararuas at the Rimutaka and Akatarawa saddles; and, of course, there is the West Coast (Paekakariki) road. But, although Paekakariki is about 900 feet high, neither this coastal road nor the original tide-affected Mukamuka-Palliser Bay road (the earliest and at one time only access to the Wairarapa) can be called moun-tain-conquest. Those roads resulted from tho pakeha's first attempt to get round the coasts of an island that was too steep in the middle. They were the lines of least resistance.

In the early part of this century the Waikaremoana gap now being conquered was tackled by the Government's roadmakers to the extent of making a road round the shores of the big lake in continuation of the WairoaWaikaremoana road. A good deal of work was done, then thero was a hitch (probably financial), , and in that slippy country the neglected road work was soon lost, to remain lost for over twenty years. Attracted by the veil of romance thrown over the "Star Lake "' and the Tuhoe (Urewera) highlands by the writings of Mr. Elsdon Best-»-whose residence in this remote and 1 in his day little-spoiled country has proved .ofinestimablepublic value —various individuals made the through trip west-east or east-west, and it was the practice in 1908,f0r travellers in the latter direction to cross the lake not by the slip-spoiled road but in a small -launch provided by the Government Accommodation House at Waikaremoaaa. Dropped at the mouth of the Opuruahine Stream, on the western side of the lake, the pedestrian made hi? way partly by stream-bed and partly by a faint mountain track through the bush to the saddle, thence to Enatahuna and Te Whaiti. It is all a bushlover's paradise. The then track did not touch Maungapohatu (Sacred Mountain) and the Maori village of the once rebellious Eva at its foot, but it'seems that the new road will do this. Maungapohatu has probably lost the intense anti-pakehaism of 1908. The rovival and realisation of the Urewera road enterprise have no doubt been assisted by the notice the district has won through the Waikaremoana hydro-elec-trical power development. In the above list there is one other lost road, the coastal road'from Wellington to WairaSrapa. Is not the time due, and overdue, for considering its recovery!