drive from Rotumanu to Kotuku and then Greymouth—although the road was only kept navigable by grazing deer and a gate needed to be traversed at Bell Hill. Sawmilling Numerous sawmills sprung up along the railway line; some transported felled trees to the railway with bush trams operating on wooden rails. Other had logging gangs felling trees around the lake and towing them by boat to mills on the lake shore. Nyberg's mill, later the Lake Brunner Sawmilling Company, operated in Ruru. The Moana Sawmill Company, with a log landing near the Arnold River outfall. Stratford and Blair operated a sawmill beside the Moana railway station. In the 1930s trees were felled at Irishman's Landing across the lake and towed by launch, the Monica, to Moana. United Mills operated in Te Kinga, using timber felled in a logging camp across the lake at Bain Bay. Initially they were transported across the lake by the Tiki, a steam launch, and from 1938 to 1963 by the Tikinui, which towed a punt onto which logs that would not float were fastened. When a "Brucer" blew, waves were so high they would break over the Tikinui's wheelhouse (8 feet above lake level); the boat would cast loose its punt and logs and make for shelter, returning to retrieve any floating logs the next day. After native timber forestry had ceased on the West Coast, a business sprang up using divers and chains to salvage logs from the lake bottom for milling. Logs that had sunk to the lake floor a century ago remained perfectly preserved, with axe marks still visible. In the Great Depression, two thirds of the area's sawmills shut down, and in 1963 the Lake Brunner Sawmilling Company, the first to send logs through the Ōtira Tunnel, closed from lack of suitable timber. The cleared flat land around the lake proved suitable for farming, particularly dairy herds, and from the early 1960s local farms were supplying the Westland Cooperative Dairy Co. in Hokitika. By 1976 twenty percent of the catchment of the lake was farmed and Moana had a population of 84, with most of the buildings being holiday homes. Flora Lake Brunner is notable in being surrounded by intact native forest, although the flats have been extensively logged while kahikatea (Dacrycarpus dacrydioides) swamp forest is found at many points along the lake shore. Kahikatea is able to tolerate submergence of its