More than 100 years ago, teams of Chinese men lived in little mud huts in the sub-alpine hills surrounding the Nokomai and Nevis ranges in Northern Southland.

It was challenging and unforgiving terrain, exposed to the mercies of extreme weather. Using picks and shovels, they built a water race to supply the Nokomai Valley gold mine.

Now, picture a Garston farmer swinging a pick in snow and hail, wielding a shovel in searing sun, and lifting massive rocks by hand 1100 metres above sea level.

This has been Tom O'Brien's life, a labour of love if you like, for the past two years.

"You probably have to be a little bit mad to hand build a trail like this, " he confesses.

Armed with picks, shovels and wheelbarrows, O'Brien has carved a 27-kilometre hiking and mountainbiking trail out of the same sub-alpine hills above Garston that those dogged Chinese workers toiled in to build a water race more than a century ago.

Welcome Rock Trails' Roaring Lion Trail opened yesterday and O'Brien hopes this will be his fulltime job for many years to come.

READ MORE: Garston trail offers big bug encounters

Blackmore Station has been his family's farm for 111 years. As a boy, his parents retired 1000ha of their freehold farm and placed it in a conservation covenant, hoping to preserve the high country and allow it to regenerate.

At the time this was somewhat revolutionary, he says.

You were doing well to freehold your farm, let alone go and set half of it aside and limit your farming ability, O'Brien says.

After attending university and working various jobs, he returned to the farm about 10 years ago and leased it from his father.

But with the decline in wool sales and being forced to offer dairy support, O'Brien began to wonder what he might do with that 1000ha of land that was unsuitable for farming.

He remembers being 12 or 13 years old, and heading to a spot on the conservation land where Mud Hut stood - which was once home to a Chinese man tasked with maintaining the water race.

O'Brien often visited Mud Hut and would pretend to go deerstalking.

"I always knew it was a place people would think was special. I remember writing notes about how I could get people to come here. I guess I came full circle."

The family farm was leased to another farmer, and O'Brien, along with wife Katie, threw everything they had at Welcome Rock Trails.

He approached mountainbiking clubs in Queenstown and Southland and asked where they could find a hand-built, single-track trail with historical and ecological significance where riders had the option of staying overnight.

"They sort of looked at us blankly and said it doesn't exist, " O'Brien says.

"We knew that guys from Queenstown or Invercargill would drive four or five hours to go to places like Naseby. This will be a lot closer for them."

O'Brien is banking on the history of the area being a big drawcard.

Welcome Rock, for which the trail is named, was a trading post from the late 1800s, and is the highest point on the trail at 1130m above sea level.

The Roaring Lion is rumoured to be a nickname for the creek that runs through the property, given by the Chinese men describing the sound of the water.

The Mud Hut was lovingly restored in the 1990s by the family, with support from the Department of Conservation, and is offered as accommodation on the trail.

There are also other goldmining artefacts and tools scattered throughout the hills, some of which were uncovered while O'Brien was building the trail.

But perhaps the feature he's most fond of is a waterfall, with a small pond at the bottom.

"I'm looking forward to riding it on a stinking hot day, and jumping off my bike under the waterfall to cool off."

He made rules for the trail before he built it, including keeping the gradient low - no steeper than 5 degrees at all times - as well as avoiding introducing new materials to the area.

That meant sourcing rock from creek beds to build stacked stone bridges, and carting shingle from dry areas to form the trail in a boggy spot.

Despite the mammoth task, O'Brien says he's been pretty confident all the way through.

"I only had momentary pangs of 'what am I doing here'."

It's also important to remember the help he's had, he says.

About 100 pairs of hands have been at the end of his picks, a lot of them young tourists who came to volunteer for a couple of days or a couple of months.

The Pick Challenge soon became a rite of passage for volunteers - trying to hold a pick by the end of its handle above your head or in a straight line in front of you provided entertainment in the unforgiving environment and during long days, O'Brien says.

Aside from the physical exertion of picking, moving rocks, and a few blisters, he's had no injuries.

"You just go into a mode, a routine, " he says.

After two years and 5000 hours at the end of a pick or shovel, and thousands of cubic metres of earth removal, O'Brien is tentatively excited that it's all about to start.

If successful, in two years O'Brien will consider a stage two for the trail - named The Braying Donkey Trail - down to the Nokomai River, and past old Chinese graves, which would link up to The Roaring Lion.

Standing on the trail in his Red Bands, snow falling, and surveying the land below, O'Brien gestures to the farms that stretch out for miles. "Farming land will make more money, but I want to prove that this land can make money too.

"If we don't make money, I'll believe I've failed."

Follow Hannah McLeod on Twitter.

- The Southland Times

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