Photo: Supplied
On a mild evening in November, Dave Howard and John Wellington were out with their machetes and some pink ribbon bush-bashing a route for a new bike trail beside the Hawea River in Upper Clutha.
They tied ribbon on scrappy broom bushes and laid low the pigfern as they went.
"That's kind of a fun part of it, just cutting a track, going, 'What are the cool things that we can see along here?', whether it's little plants or view-corridors," Howard said.
"So you might take them past cool rocks or trees or just, how the landform will feel when you move through it, thinking about what's the experience someone's going to have when they travel through here.
"So that's quite a fun stage despite the matagouri and the bush lawyer (two types of plants) and everything else that wants to kill you and prick you."
Up until recently he had thornier problems to deal with. He had helped design the Kawarau Gorge trail from Queenstown to Cromwell, and the Roxburgh Gorge extension. By 2018 they were ready to go.
Instead, they went nowhere, running smack-dab into a long-forgotten policy suddenly reactivated at the Department of Conservation (DOC).
"Until recently, the current Conservation General Policy was applied quite rigidly in Conservation Management Strategies (CMS)," DOC told RNZ. "This meant that unless the CMS listed a proposed location for biking, a (costly, multi-year) partial review or amendment process for the CMS was required, simply to consider the application on its merits."
While the policy had slumbered, trail building had cracked on, the network and patronage expanding rapidly in the decade after John K
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