Queenstown Lakes District Council has moved to adopt a $105,000 option to upgrade the river eroded Von Rd - the sole public access to Mt Nicholas Station, Walter Peak Station and the Walter Peak visitor centre.
The road was washed out during heavy rain in August last year and a temporary road that has been in place since then is now threatened with erosion.
The motion carried at yesterday's infrastructure services committee meeting would see the road - also an increasingly popular biking track - repaired and an upstream flood deflector bank built.
The committee rejected minimal and moderate options costed at $18,500 and $43,500 respectively.
The resource consent for the unbudgeted project is expected to be granted later this month, council network operations engineer Mark Wardill said, but must go through affected party approval process.
Mr Wardill said he foresaw no hitches and said only one of six affected party approvals was yet to be received.
Once the Otago Regional Council had approved the completed application, he expected work to begin in mid-March.
Riverbed works needed to be completed before the start of the trout-spawning season or begin in December, when the season finished, so as not to affect recreational anglers.
A "rock armoured training bank" at the confluence of Station Burn and the north-flowing Von River is damaged, which has caused the flood erosion.
The works will include more than 2000 tonnes of deflector groynes to divert river flows from the roadside embankment.
The upgrade will be subsidised by the New Zealand Transport agency, which will pay $48,000 towards the project.
Von Rd is part of the Southland-Queenstown Lakes Around the Mountains national cycleway proposal.
Overnight cycle trails are already operating through Real Journeys, which expects a four-day trail to be running about this time next year.
About 8000 cyclists are expected in the first year. That could grow to 20,000 after five years, based on Venture Southland figures sourced from the Ministry of Tourism.
