Mellonsfolly's Wild West
New Zealand couple captures the heart and soul of the American West.
By: Meghan Saar 03/01/2007
When the creation legend of a country consists of its North Island being the fish, the South Island, the canoe in which the fisherman sat, and Stewart Island (to its south), the anchor that held the canoe so the fisherman could haul in his fish, is it any wonder that New Zealand attracted celebrated Western author and world record-holding fisherman Zane Grey?
Once Grey made his way to Russell, the oldest city in the country (a favorite station for whalers in the early days), he was not quite what the Kiwis expected.
They “were disappointed in me ... they had expected to see me in sombrero, chaps, spurs and guns. Young ladies of the village, too, were disappointed, for they had shared with people all over the world the illusion that the author Zane Grey was a woman,” wrote Grey, in his 1926 account of his fishing adventures, Tales of the Angler’s Eldorado, New Zealand—14 years after his famous novel Riders of the Purple Sage was published.
New Zealand has finally found a cowboy who fits the image in 58-year-old John Bedogni, who, with his 57-year-old wife Kenda, owns an Old West town in Mellons Bay, Auckland, located in the upper North Island of New Zealand, a country roughly the size of Colorado. The town is about a one-hour drive from the ski base of Ohakune.
Mellonsfolly, they call it. “Building a Western town in such an isolated place was nothing but ‘utter folly,’ hence the name,” Kenda says.
What started out as a plan to build a lodge for close friends to stay in turned into the “log cabin that got away on us,” Kenda admits. The $5.5 million-dollar ranch with its 17-building Old West town opened in February 2006, after four years of intensive construction by workers from Wanganui (two hours away), who even stayed at the ranch during the week, only heading home to their families on the weekends.
Mellonsfolly is located on 1,000 acres of wilderness in the Ruatiti Valley, which was opened for settlement in 1909. Most of the settling occurred when soldiers returned from WWI and set up crude campsites and cleared land to raise livestock. The wives and children followed, and homes were constructed from timber milled on the site. In its heyday, the Mangaparua settlement was home to 42 families.
Life was hard for these families. The only access they had to the valley was via a two-day trip on a steamer up the Whanganui River, the country’s third largest river, with an overnight stop at Pipiriki. Yet no cheers of joy were exclaimed when the government finally provided roads, completing the final stretch into the valley with a concrete bridge that crossed Mangaparua Gorge. By 1943, the last family had left, leading locals to christen the roadway “Bridge to Nowhere.”
Old Chimneys and horse-drawn machinery bits mark the sites of those early pioneer homes near the bridge. If you continue to head past the bridge, you’ll discover the moniker no longer fits; down the old settler road is Mellonsfolly Ranch and the Whispering Hills, where guests will find a range of trails, through the beautiful backcountry wilderness, perfect for riding.
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