page_title: Old Ghost Road
section_title: Track exploration
hierarchical_section_title: Old Ghost Road / History / Track exploration
caption_attribution_description: English: Steve Stack, known as Stacky, is one of the key players who established the Old Ghost Road.
context_page_description: The Old Ghost Road is a mountain bike and tramping trail part-funded as one of the projects of the New Zealand Cycle Trail system in the Buller District of New Zealand. Of all NZCT projects, it is the technically most difficult one to ride and is rated "advanced". The highest point of the trail is at 1,280 metres.
context_section_description: Boatwright and his wife learned from the local Department of Conservation (DoC) manager, Bob Dickson, that a proposed tramping route along the Mōkihinui Gorge was part of a longer dray road that had never been completed. Shortly after in early 2007, Boatwright was handed the original of an 1886 survey plan for a "Lyell and Mokihinui Road"; the owner of the map had been told that the Rough & Tumble lodge is an appropriate place for preserving local historic artefacts. The map showed the proposed alignment that Dickson had mentioned; it followed the Mōkihinui River, then its south branch before climbing over the Lyell Range to stay above Lyell Creek to the site of Lyell township. In July 2007, Boatwright and Stack set out to tramp the route from Lyell to the Rough & Tumble lodge. Their objectives were to find out how much of the road had been built, how accessible it was, and whether it offered an attractive environment for tramping. They found that the track from Lyell stopped at Lyell Saddle and that nothing had ever been built along the south branch of the Mōkihinui. The area downstream from Mountain Creek was known to Stack and the track started again several kilometres downstream from Mōkihinui Forks. Their six-day tramp confirmed that over half of the surveyed road had never been built. And most of the part that had been built along the Mōkihinui River was threatened to be flooded by the Meridian Energy dam proposal.
caption: Steve Stack in 2018
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