Susan Buckland: Invader on two wheels

COMMENT

The hikers versus bikers argument is heating up again. The Department of Conservation may open more of our country's great walking tracks to mountain bikers.

Possibly even the Heaphy, which became off-limits to traffic on wheels when it became incorporated into a national park. My friend Jill will be not be pleased.

Jill and I walked the 82km Heaphy Track before it was declared mountain-bike free. We strolled along, enjoying the solitude, stopping occasionally to shed our backpacks and embrace the view. We lay on our backs among wild grasses, counting ourselves lucky to have a gloriously unfettered chunk of the wilderness practically to ourselves.

Occasionally other hikers would pass us by, Germans mostly, and they were knocked out by the scenery and distance from the madding crowd.

A couple of them stopped to chat. They had saved for two years to hike some of New Zealand's great walking tracks. But their contentment - and ours - was about to be shattered.

An unfamiliar squeaking sound was heard in the distance and rapidly grew louder. The Germans were perplexed and so were we. Jill, a keen birdwatcher, wondered if it were a native parrot in distress.

We were all left guessing until around the corner came a woman on a bicycle. She wore a crash helmet and skintight shorts, and her perspiring face shone like a ripe tomato. The back wheel of her bike squeaked as she banged past over tree roots and through puddles.

A kea, perhaps attracted by the strangled squeaking, alighted close by. We sympathised with the mountain parrot. Who needs this kind of intrusion on a walking track? Raucous squeaking in the middle of nowhere.

The Germans felt duped. How could the Heaphy be listed as one of New Zealand's great walks if cyclists were able to pedal through it?

Having broken the rhythm of the great outdoors the cyclist had wobbled off out of hearing. But Jill was not going to take the encounter lying down.

She wrote to the Department of Conservation (DoC). Surely the point of the Heaphy and New Zealand's other great walking tracks, she said, was to enjoy unadulterated nature. They are sacrosanct places to protect our native plants and birdlife. The shy robin, for example. God knows there are few enough of them around these days.

DoC replied that the Heaphy was about to absorbed into the Kahurangi National Park and, as such, vehicles - including bicycles - were prohibited except on formed roads.

Outside the national parks in other protected lands, DoC has aimed for balance, with dedicated bike trails and tracks to be shared by hikers and bikers - as long as the use of cycles does not, "exceed acceptable levels of social, physical or ecological impact".

Until now, the Heaphy landscape has changed little since Charles Heaphy and Thomas Brunner came upon it in 1846, the first Europeans to walk up the West Coast to the Heaphy River.

The track meanders through beech forest, tussock downs, rain forest, river valleys hung with rata vine and out through nikau palms to the pounding Tasman.

Walking the Heaphy is the way to meet nature on nature's terms. We were overtaken at one stage by a stringy looking chap with glazed eyes who was running the track in between crashing out at the huts. He can't have noticed much of the scenery.

For mountain bikers, nature must also go by in a blur when are you are bumping along bent over handlebars.

Bikers are meant to give way to hikers on walking tracks but, despite DoC's bicycle code of conduct, it is usually the other way round.

"Stop and move aside if you encounter walkers or horses," the code states. "Let others know of your presence well in advance. Being startled will upset even the most tolerant tramper."

Like Jill. Open the way for bikes on more of our walking tracks and what will be next on wheels, she wants to know. Quad bikes and 4WD vehicles?

It's enough to incense any tolerant tramper.

DoC can expect another letter from my friend any day now.