When New Zealand’s 10th great walk was announced in 2015, the first thing Jed Findlay did was hop on Instagram. He knew that the Paparoa Track, which connects the small South Island communities of Blackball and Punakaiki and cost NZ$12m to build, could be a boon for his family’s business.
“Punakaiki Beach Camp is right across the road from where the track finishes,” he reasons. “If someone puts that money right next door to you, you’re almost obliged to do something.”
Punakaiki’s 100 or so residents are wedged into a narrow strip of land between foaming seas and vertical limestone cliffs, broken only by steep green hills. There’s no phone coverage and few jobs, but Findlay couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. “This is paradise,” he says, gesturing around. “You’re right in the middle of nature.”
Hundreds of thousands of tourists already passed through every year on their way around the South Island’s rugged west coast, but few lingered after visiting the distinctive layered limestone formations known as Pancake Rocks. Like many others, Findlay hoped the Paparoa Track would change that. Having secured the @thepaparoatrack handle, he put together a business plan for additional cabin accommodation and shuttles to the trailhead.
Then he watched as the Paparoa Range was hit by successive natural disasters, followed by a global pandemic that shut down tourism entirely. Now, eight years after his initial quick thinking, Findlay is finally welcoming hikers from across the globe and helping them tackle one of the most remote – and spectacular – walks in New Zealand.
From Blackball the trail ascends through a misty “goblin forest” of moss-covered beech trees and on to exposed ridges dotted with leaden tarns and golden tussocks of flax. On clear days hikers can see the Tasman Sea to the west as well as inland towards the forbidding Southern Alps. The trail then descends through a valley of palm-filled rainforest and raging coffee-coloured rivers.
Early gold prospectors created trails that opened up parts of the Paparoa Range, but this is still wild country. On most maps the mountains appear as a mass of deep green, broken only by densely clustered topographic lines. In this terrain, 41km of the track’s 55km path had to be newly built, along with four major suspension bridges and two 20-bunk huts.
Even the existing track required extensive work to bring it to a gradient suitable for mountain bikers. Averaging 6.5 degrees, it is classified as a Grade 4 advanced track. The track router Hamish Seaton admits that it is “still reasonably steep, so a rider will pick up speed fairly easily”.
Before work on the track could begin, lidar imaging was used to create a detailed map of the region’s contours down to one-metre intervals. Then the planners embarked on 72 trips over eight months to finalise a 25-metre corridor.
Seaton experimented with endless variations of this “giant 3D puzzle”. The aim was to build an enjoyable trail with minimal impact on existing vegetation.
Before the Paparoa Track, the region’s last major economic development was the Pike River Mine, which opened in 2008 and closed after an explosion in 2010 that killed 29 people. The victims’ families were the ones who first proposed the Paparoa Track, as a memorial and a way to create more sustainable local jobs.
In July 2017 three build crews began working simultaneously on separate sections of the track. They managed 300 metres of trail in a good week – but good weeks were rare. As Department of Conservation communications advisor Jose Watson said at the time, “on the west coast, nature is the rule rather than the exception”.
Cyclones Fehi and Gita wreaked havoc with the work. The devastation wrought by Gita is still visible at the Punakaiki end of the track, where dense forest abruptly gives way to clearings littered with felled trees.
An unnamed weather event that followed caused even more damage as weeks of torrential rain and floods washed away large sections of track and several bridges. The rescued timber was later used to make benches outside one of the huts.
“I can’t think of many places in the world where a trail has been built through such challenging terrain,” says Seaton, who has worked other bike routes in New Zealand. Through it all the construction teams adhered to the mantra articulated by project manager Mark Nelson. “Every tree was a conversation: could we go around it, avoid cutting it, protect its roots?”
Soil and native flora were saved and replanted beside the track. Even before it opened to the public, hut warden Sierra Jones was impressed: “You’d come across some sections of track and it was hard to believe that they were new.”
Huts along the track are equipped with heaters, eating areas, bunks with mattresses and even phone chargers. These amenities are a godsend for hikers and bikers tackling “adverse weather conditions” (a polite way of putting it in a region with an average annual rainfall of about 6,000mm). On the Paparoa Track’s opening day the rain gauge outside one hut overflowed – more than 200mm fell in 24 hours.
The track was originally scheduled to open in 2018. That date was postponed several times until it was finally set for 1 December 2019. But weeks before the official launch a landslide meant the track had to be partially closed for repairs, which took four months.
None of that stopped anticipation among outdoor enthusiasts, who booked 6,600 of the first season’s 8,500 nights, before the trail opened. Jones was unsurprised by the overwhelming response, because “until the Paparoa Track was built, it was very hard to access these mountains”.
Findlay’s transfers to the partially open trail proved immediately popular and in March 2020 the completed Paparoa Track finally opened to the public. “From that point, we were on,” he says. “We had heaps of people coming through and everything was running smoothly for about three weeks.
“Then we went into lockdown.”
International tourists disappeared almost overnight, but domestic visitors meant that, in terms of hut occupancy, it was one of New Zealand’s most popular great walks throughout the pandemic.
“Because it’s the newest … everyone was really keen to get on it,” says Jacob Fleming, supervisor at the Paparoa national park visitors centre. Numbers have risen steadily since then and the 2023/24 season looks likely to be the biggest yet.
With international travel back, the Department of Conservation is forecasting that international tourists will eventually account for 24% to 38% of walkers and 16% of bikers. This summer the 11.6km Pike29 Memorial Track is scheduled to open too, connecting the Paparoa Track with the Pike River Mine site.
Fleming says the track has also brought “significant economic benefits” to the area. “If the track wasn’t here, there wouldn’t have been anybody travelling through Punakaiki or Blackball over the quiet winter months.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Findlay, who says that “after international tourism went to crap, our accommodation business fell by two thirds”.
“The track was what kept us afloat.”
Punakaiki Beach Camp is busy again and international visitors are getting ready to walk the Paparoa Track after several false starts. Findley is adamant it has “absolutely been worth the wait”.
Alexis Buxton-Collins hiked the Paparoa Track in 2020 as a guest of Tourism New Zealand.
