Haast-Hollyford: Routes and leaves

The Barn Bay track sometimes follows riverbeds, some dry, some wet. Photo by Marjorie Cook.

I'd bought a new mountain bike but it seemed every tree in Sticky Forest hid a person waiting for me to fall off.

• Slideshow: NZ's last frontier: Barn Bay Track

It was time for secret training.

Let's go to Barn Bay, I suggested to my friend, teacher Jen Rawson.

"What's there? How do you get there?" she replied.

HEADING SOUTH . . .

Barn Bay - home to Hector's dolphins, Fiordland crested penguins and sandflies the size of sparrows - is about 70km south of Haast.

It is a nationally significant pounamu (greenstone) and kai moana (seafood) collection site and sand dunes and wildlife rate highly for their biological value.

You could fly from Haast to Barn Bay in about 20 minutes.

You could go by sea.

Fishing boats regularly visit the bay's intriguing rock-stack islands.

You could drive on the 4WD track through the Cascade River and the rainforest.

You could take a pleasant and straightforward five-hour walk.

Or you could bike the track, although you might hop off a lot for creek beds strewn with boulders and trees and mud-bottomed puddles that swallow bikes whole.

We started late, it was getting dark and, embarrassingly, our friends Rob Ormandy and Simone Maier were walking faster than us.

We caught up when they shot a deer, so we stashed bikes and backstraps in the trees and walked the last few kilometres together to our accommodation, a private house built by a fisherman decades ago and one of just two licensed to occupy the Department of Conservation reserve.

We awoke the next morning to sparkling blue skies, a calm sea, singing cicadas and blessed isolation.

SEALING THE DEAL . . .

I have to confess I had another motive to visit: A revamped proposal of a century-old dream suggests a 198km-long, 7.5m-wide state highway be built from Haast down to Big Bay, then along the Pyke River to Hollyford.

I wanted to understand more about this frequently shelved project, first mooted in the 1870s.

In the 1990s, the Westland District Council surveyed and costed a more practical alternative that has the same end points but traverses coastal rather than alpine terrain in the mid-section.

Last year, public submissions provided the council with an incentive to dust off the files and set aside funding for a feasibility study.