Haast to Paringa Cattle Track

The historic Haast to Paringa Cattle Track is a trail through South Westland, New Zealand, constructed in 1875 to allow farmers in the Landsborough and Cascade Valley area to drive their cattle on an annual two-week journey to the sale yards in Whataroa. It was constructed as an inland loop to bypass the precipitous cliffs at Knights Point. For 90 years it was the only land access to the settlements of Haast and Jackson Bay, but the last mob of cattle was driven in 1961, and the construction of a highway connecting Paringa to Haast Pass in 1965 made it redundant. After falling into disuse, the cattle track was converted into a 33-kilometre (21 mi), three-day tramping track, opening in 1981. The track and its three huts (Blue River/Blowfly, Māori Saddle, and Coppermine Creek) are maintained by the New Zealand Department of Conservation.

The cattle track follows the route of an old Māori trail. To avoid the steep cliffs and rugged coastline around Knights Point (an area that was labelled by early diggers "run-or-be-damned") travellers up and down the West Coast would head inland along the Waita and Moeraki Rivers, crossing the low (700 m) Paringa Saddle.

The Westland County Council in 1871 decided to clear tracks from Bruce Bay to Haast, and offered contracts of £1380 for 37 miles and £800 for 19 miles. The explorer Charlie Douglas, along with Julies Matthies and a man by the name of McGloin, undertook to clear bush from Lake Paringa to the mouth of the Waita River, the route of the current track. Later contracts formed the road to a width of 4–9 feet, and metalled it with gravel to a depth of 6 inches. All shingle was taken in by wheelbarrow, and unmortered stone culverts were built over waterways. The road was suitable for pack mules and horses, and later enlarged to accommodate drays.

The track took over ten years to complete. By 1882 15 km of the "Mahitahi–Haast" road had been finished (at a cost of £2779), and in 1883 only "three and a half miles" were still to be done, according to the report by Gerhard Mueller.

A road over the Paringa Saddle would be an important connection for the South Westland settlements of Haast, Okuru, and Jackson Bay, which even into the first half of the 20th century were still isolated from the rest of New Zealand. A ship would arrive every two or three months with supplies, but the land access was via the Haast Pass, a route only suitable for horses, rugged, over 80 km long, and requiring boat transport down Lake Wānaka at the end.

By 1875 mobs of cattle were already being driven from the Arawhata and Cascade river valleys north over the Paringa Saddle—now a shorter and easier alternative to the journey over Haast Pass. Mail was taken over the cattle track fortnightly by packhorse, a telephone line was connected over the track in 1910, and radio arrived in the 1930s. To sell their cattle, farmer needed to drive them 130 miles north to the nearest sale yards at Whataroa.

Des Nolan (b. 1920) recalled the process to getting cattle to market from Okuru over the Haast–Paringa track around World War II. By this time there were three huts on the track: Coppermine Creek, the Iron Hut, and the Blue River or Blowfly Hut. First the cattle were herded to a 50 acre holding paddock at Coppermine Creek, where they rested for several days. Then they were driven 20 miles over the Paringa Saddle in one day, past the Iron Hut to the Blue River. The following day took the cattle 11 miles to Paringa, where they stayed in a paddock to recover before a day-long journey to Jacobs River. The Nolans would drive up to 200 cattle at a time, needing at least half a dozen men to accompany the mob over the narrow, difficult track at the Paringa Saddle; each man would need to drive around 35 cattle over the worst sections of road. Over 100 years perhaps 50,000 cattle were taken over the cattle track in this way.

In 1942, a mica mine was developed in the Mataketake Range. Mica was a mineral used in radio condensers and spark-plug washers in Allied aircraft, and was deemed important for the war effort. Charlie Douglas had identified mica deposits in the area in his 1896 geological map, and a sample of sheet mica he collected was displayed at the 1906 Christchurch exhibition. The worldwide mica shortage spurred geologists Harold Wellman and Dick Willett to locate Douglas's mica deposit in 1941. A horse track was cleared up to the pegmatites near Mt Clarke, at an altitude of over 1000 m. In 1944 a more accessible deposit was found at an altitude of 500 m, south of Blowfly Hut; a bridge, road, and what is now known as the Old Mica Mine were built in the bush. Mica was mined until late 1945, but in the end the deposits proved too small and of poorer quality than those overseas.