The Road Over the Pass

In August 1857 the Superintendent of Canterbury, James FitzGerald, drove a

tandem over the top of this pass on a road that was not finished. Two horses

in a line, a groom at each head, men leaning on the back of the dog-cart to

keep it from tipping backwards, and FitzGerald on the box in good spirits.

He had bet his prestige that the road would go through. The harbour below

gave him a dinner.

The road had been a long wait. In July 1849 Captain Joseph Thomas, the

surveyor, had put on the map a proper carriage road: up from Lyttelton over

the pass where you are standing, down to Sumner, and on to the

plains where the city would be. A tunnel through the summit, he promised,

would be dug before the first ships. The Canterbury Association's money ran

out. The tunnel was never dug, and the road was never finished in time.

By late 1850 the ships were coming and the road was not done. Charlotte

Godley, who watched, wrote that the great road was still very unfinished,

and in some places the line was so raw you climbed it with a rope.

So a bridle path was scratched in instead: a track from the harbour floor up

to the saddle of the ridge behind, two miles shorter than the road line and

cheap to cut — it cost three hundred pounds — meant for horses. It was named

for the steep stretch below the summit where a rider had to get off and lead

the horse by the bridle.

From December 1850 until the carriage road opened in 1857, the bridle path

was the only land route from the harbour to the plains. Families crossed it

single file, took their first look at the Canterbury plains from the top of

the saddle, and went down the far side. Luggage went mostly by sea; the

people went over the hill.

The famous picture of that crossing, families in their best clothes

striding over the ridge in a long line, tells the easy version. It was

mostly harder than that: the climb was steep and slow, and there was no

carriage at all, only what a horse or a pair of legs could manage. Yet it

worked for close to seven years.

The proper road had to wait for the new province's own engineer. Edward

Dobson abandoned the tunnel — the money for it never existed — and put the

road over the summit in switchbacks instead: the notorious zigzag, clawed

into the western face of the hill, the same line that still climbs the ridge

below you.

The zigzag went over in August 1857, and from that month the pass was a

daily carriage and mail line: the same link the bridle path had carried for

the first years was now a proper road.

Lady Barker came down by coach in 1865, and remembered the pull on the

horses, and the descent taken, she said, far too quickly.

The carriage ran until 1867, and then it stopped. The zigzag survived as a

walk.

The trail that begins at this summit and runs down the hill is that road,

the line Captain Thomas marked for a carriageway in 1849 and the province

finished late and short. The Lyttelton railway tunnel, opened in 1867, took

its traffic and left the old road to the wind. It stayed that way for

seventy years — until the motorcar found the pass again.