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Burtton's Track
It could have been any New Zealand bush track on any sunny day - except for the communications aerial set up at the track entrance. It could have been just a bunch of ordinary trampers except for the Diplomatic Protection Squad blokes amongst them with comms equipment in their rucksacks, staring into the trees with something on their minds other than the happy naming of native plant species.
Someone was about to walk the new track who was both an ordinary and an extraordinary tramper. She'd taken time out to do it on her 56th birthday. The same woman who always extracts every salient detail of the forthcoming day from the confidantes who surround her, but whose only question that day had been, as one of the secretaries confided: 'What's in my lunch ?'
A crowd of 100 milled about, and while it waited, plied itself with morning tea - muffins, paper cups, milk, sugar and brimming tea and coffee urns laid out on trestle tables, and linen table cloths, courtesy of Palmerston North City Council. The crowd snapped up copies of Ian Argyle's new book 'Burtton's Track'. If you wanted a gink at backblocks history along the new tramping route, this booklet was a must. It was 24 pages of reminiscence of the old days, with photographs of James Burtton, the reclusive sheep farmer who'd singlehandedly carved 3 miles of dray track out of the rugged Tokomaru Valley in the 1910s, then died when his three-wire swing bridge across the Tokomaru River broke and killed him.
The CD player hidden in a nearby concrete pipe burst into a trumpet annunciation - the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, had arrived. Arrived also were the Minister of Conservation, Chris Carter, Education Minister and MP for Palmerston North Steve Maharey, and two mayors, Palmerston North's Helen Tanguay and Horowhenua's Brendan Duffy. Te Araroa Manawatu trust Chairman Frank Goldingham invited Helen Clark to open the trail on which his volunteers, and paid work gang had laboured for months.
"It's great news to be able to say to Kiwis - here's the great outdoors in your own back yard," said the PM, sweeping her hand towards the newly tracked forest. The new track was 16 kilometres long, she said, and it was more than that. She noted that the track was also the newest section of Te Araroa the proposed continuous hiking route 2,924 kilometres from Cape Reinga to Bluff. Te Araroa Trust and its seven regional trusts, said the PM, had now put in some 295 kilometres of new route,providing links between existing tracks and opening a legal thoroughfare for walkers that now stretched along 80% of the proposed route.
"We'll have a complete trail before too long that'll make the Pennine Way walkway look like a kindergarten track."
On that note, we were off. The Manawatu 4WD Club provided transport for 85 walkers over the first 4 kilometres of pine forest roads, then everyone went over a stile and into the bush, and dropped quickly down a ridge to the Tokomaru River.
The Tokomaru River runs through a rough, tough, steep-sided valley. When scoping Te Araroa in the late 1990s there was no track, I got rained in here, the river was high and I bailed out across swift water on an inflatable Thermarest air mattress. But on opening day February 26 2006, with the track in place, it was a dream run. Even the river was little more than ankle deep, and the Prime Minister crossed it with aplomb. Eightyfive trampers crossed it behind her then sat down to lunch on the grassy clearing that is old Jim Burtton's whare site.
From this point, 5 kilometres to the exit on Tokomaru Valley Road we followed the track James Burtton built to connect his lonely farm to the outside world. It's on a road reserve, and Te Araroa Manawatu Trust, working with DoC's Waikanae Area Office has made it accessible again. When they started work, it was still covered with slips and windfall, and truncated often by the collapse bluffs into the river. Now it's again, at least sometimes, a discernible dray route, often two metres wide and with good gradients. Our long line of walkers, tramped across its grassy flats next to the river, filed along its bush tunnels, or stopped high up on the bluffs to glimpse deep views to the river below. I think all of us thanked James Burtton for his lonely years-long effort of long ago.
At the junction of Burtton's track and Tokomaru Valley Road, a low memorial lay covered by a dark cloth. Palmerston North man Ian Argyle had been in charge of much of the clearance of Burtton's track and in the course of it had found a pick-axe and grubber-head that he supposed had belonged to the farmer. The PM unveiled the cairn, and the crowd clapped a folk memorial with those track implements set in concrete, a tribute to a kiwi backblocks farmer.
The 2nd Field Squadron, NZ Army Engineers had cleared the next bit of track, chainsawing windfall and putting in new culverts to enable, if necessary, 4WD access. We walked out along it to the southern trailhead, and then with a precision that indicated again this was no ordinary day, were whisked by the 4WD convoy to the Mangaore Hall.
Word was out that a birthday party was in progress and half a dozen local kids squirmed through the thickets of gossiping adults to liberate the pikelets and muffins from under the tea towels.
Then the prime minister arrived. We lit the candles on her birthday cake. She blew them out. We sang happy birthday. She said thanks very much, she'd really enjoyed the day. The new track was open. The past had been given its due. The future awaited: this new track, and soon to come, another opening at Round Hill in Southland.
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A Burtton's Track map (180kb) is downloadable from the 'Trail Maps' section on this site.
The booklet 'Burtton's Track' is available from Te Araroa Manawatu Trust, PO Box 1922, Palmerston North. $6 incl. postage.
