Montana Heritage Trail

Section 4: Long Road Track, Simla to Upper Kauri Track Junction

With lunch and a cup of tea on board, all sorts of improvements are ocurring, though it helps that the first bit is pleasantly downhill for some way.

Profile Simla (L) to Upper Kauri Track (R) from memory-map graphic

Long Road is a signposted road off Bethells Rd. It is shown on the topo sheet as a white "road" but by the time it reaches us at Simla, it is no more than 4WD farmbike standard. Which is better than we have been walking on elsewhere, but still very slippery underfoot, not to say muddy.

Thank God it's downhill. This is more like it. I take the lead from Miranda for a bit to give her a rest from it,

but the track swiftly becomes too slippery for this to be a viable option,

There are a couple of "detours" on this section which take us off Long Rd, the first to the right, much narrower and more winding than the track we have been on,

and the second to the left, both rejoining Long Road and providing little obvious rationale for the detour. Both are signposted as "Montana Heritage Trail". The only virtue to be had from them is a metal surface underfoot for a few hundred metres. Soon enough, we are back on the Long Rd Track. The greasy track surface apart, this is lovely bush to be walking through, dense and lush.

The Montana Heritage Trail once again departs for a few winding hundred metres

in which we see the shape of tracks to come — barely wide enough for large people, with a generous ditch on either side and a gravel top — thin and dry like a number of our sponsor's products — and re-emerges onto Long Road,

but when it does, the Long Road Track has been gifted a gravel surface.

This is lovely walking. It is long enough since lunch for the blood sugar to be right back to optimum, and not long enough for it to begin depleting again. This is the beginning of what is for me the best part of the entire walk. We pass a couple of clearings that look as if they might have been used to stockpile metal, and suddenly, we've arrived. Miranda has had her camera firmly in it's bag and only now is she looking around to see what is there to be framed.