Men who helped trail blaze the Paringa-Haast section of the Haast highway in the early 1960s through wild bush and around sheer bluffs, retraced the same route over a smooth tarsealed road for the 50th anniversary celebration of the road opening, at the weekend.
They were among the 200 people attending the two-day celebration at Haast, marking the completion of the 55km road link which completed State highway 6 and opened up the West Coast as a major tourist route.
A highlight was a re-enactment of the ribbon cutting at the official opening in 1965, back on the same site at Knights Point, high above the Tasman Sea.
The Paringa to Haast section was completed five years after the Haast Pass road had been opened to the south, effectively finishing the road connecting the West Coast with Otago.
The feat was achieved by camps of contractors, largely Roadways NZ and the Ministry of Works as well as numerous smaller contractors, who bulldozed through the road from opposite ends, meeting at Breccia Creek, just south of Knights Point.
At the weekend reunion, stories and more than 3000 photographs documenting the road construction, the communities that sprang up with the workers, including a school at the Whakapohai River camp, and the early machinery used, were all highlighted and re-lived.
John Cowan, a fifth generation Haast resident, recalled the change the construction of the Haast Pass section brought to Haast in 1960, and then the road north to Paringa five years later, allowing them to drive to Hokitika for the first time, and in just over three-and-a-half hours. Until then travel to Haast was by plane.
One who was testament to the challenges of building the road was former Ministry of Works boss Les McKenzie, of Cobden, who worked on the first survey site in 1953 and finished as a contracts manager in 1966, the year after the road opened.
Mr McKenzie and Ian Kenning, who worked leading contract forces from opposite ends of the route, meeting at Breccia Creek, were called on to cut the ribbon at the re-enactment on Saturday.
The story of how the popular lookout got its name was also shared for the occasion.
Mr McKenzie said that ahead of the 1965 opening there had been parliamentary discussions around naming it after one of the MPs at the time. However, the Ministry of Works had persisted with the name they had affectionately given to it in honour of a dog, Knight, belonging to chief surveyor Norman McGeorge.
His widow, Lorna McGeorge and daughter, Helen Zonneveld, attended the weekend celebrations to represent their late husband and father, who took Knight, a black labrador, to work with him each day.
More stories and old photographs were shared over the weekend, which concluded with a church service yesterday, after a reunion dinner in Haast on Saturday night, bringing together contractors and their families from as far as Australia and throughout the North Island.
A new plaque on the Knights Point monument erected for the 1965 opening, was also unveiled on Saturday to commemorate the first 50 years.
Speaking at the ribbon cutting, Westland Mayor Mike Havill - who has a personal connection to the road through his wife Bernadette, whose father Maurice Roberts oversaw one of the main bridging contracts - acknowledged the hard labour and conditions endured, but also its fruits, namely tourism.
"It was a huge effort that was taken to push this road through. Air conditioning, power steering, all those things would have been a foreign language back then. It was hard yakka, a lot of grunt, no doubt the raincoats leaked then more than they do today, and they didn't have the high vis jackets ... [they] just got on with sheer determination to do a job," Mr Havill said.
Fifty years on, the Haast highway was still of national significance, he said.
