Mount Beauty Big Hill Mountain Bike Park

I had two goals this weekend ... One was to ride the trails up at Falls Creek and the other was to get into the Mt Beauty Mountain bike park and explore the trails there.

There were some challenges to this second goal, the primary one being that the trail map (available from the information centre for $3) showed a pretty complex series of tracks which we had to find our way around ...

Secondly, as we discovered out there, there are an awful lot of trails which aren't on that map ... like most of them and there is a distinct lack of on ground signage, especially on ground signage which relates vaguely to anything shown on the trail map.

In hindsight this is probably why I kept coming across articles saying that this was a mountain bike park that needed local knowledge to find your way around ...

Our one stroke of luck came when sitting in the local bakery.

I was taking Bec through where I roughly planned on riding today when the lady who came to take my not empty cup noticed the map and asked where we planned to ride.

I proudly showed her my route plans, to which she observed, in one of those 'I better be polite, but this customer is snake bait' tones of voice .. "Geez ... I don't know if I'd go that way... " before moving onto the next table.

I immediately called her back and she basically pointed out that I was choosing to ride up all the intermediate blue runs and down all the easy green runs (I'd read that the survey track was a good downhill flow ride) and she said she always rides it the other way around.

She made sense, and on the principle that local riders know their own trails I decided to take her advice.

Which is why we started our ride heading up the Survey Track, whereas my whole reason for coming here had been to ride down it.

Now the problem with taking some strangers advice is that while they may be a knowledgeable good samaritan who has just made your day so much better, they equally may have ruined it and gone on making lattes oblivious to the chaos they have just caused in your life.

In this case ...

Well it wasn't perfect ... there was at least one spectacular crash, and we took more wrong turns in one hour than I've made in the whole rest of the year, but the ride up Survey Track was fun, it was the rest of the park where we got lost ... and I think that would have happened no matter which way we went.

I guess the upside is that if you're going to get lost somewhere, this isn't such a bad place to do it ...

As you can see from the photos above the tracks are old school single trail. They're rough, narrow and often unpredictable in terms of what's around the next corner and you're never certain where you are or where to go.

I kind of liked it, but don't come here thinking you'll find your way around in an hour or so ... like maybe I did ... this is a park that needs lots of time to explore and learn its intricacies.

I reckon it would be a gold mine to have on your doorstep, but for the rest of us who just drop by, come prepared for the confusion.

High Country Lavender Farmstay

So I'm pretty sure I mentioned in an earlier post that one of the attractions of this weekend in Bright was that Bec had already handed over the big money for our accommodation ( http://www.highcountrylavender.com.au/)  and so all I had to pick up was the nightly cost of an extra bed at $20 a night.

Sweet!

Well, that's what she told me, but it seems she may have missed some details ...

You see my bed is in a little annex of the main studio area and there are some slight differences in facilities, for example here is Bec's nice log fire (yes, I do have to light it and keep it going) just metres from her bed ...

Her backup heat pump ...

And let's not forget her spare oil heater and electric blanket ... just in case.

... and of course her bathroom is just 3 steps from her bed (and probably has central floor heating to keep her tootsies warm) ...

You know the saying that you get what you pay for ... well my accommodation is slightly less luxurious. No heat pump, wood fire or heated floors for me ...

Nope, if I want to go to the toilet at 3am in the morning, I have to get up, put my beanie and puffer jacket on and head outside across the cold concrete veranda to the out-house ...

My bedroom door is the one closest ... the toilet is down the other end of the house past the BBQ ...

True story.

The Fungi of Fainter Falls

On our way back from Falls Creek, Bec and I decided to go and do the short walk out to Fainter Falls.

It was only meant to be 900m each way, but it took us quite a while as we got somewhat distracted by taking photos of Fungi ...

Oh, and there was a waterfall as well ...

Falls Creek

I had checked.  I had.

I'd checked on weatherzone.com.au, I'd checked the 'official' (and completely useless) falls creek website, I'd tried to check the webcams (none were on) and we'd even stopped at the Mt Beauty Information centre and checked there ... and the advice was unanimous ... yes, snow had been falling up at Falls Creek, but it wasn't settled on the ground so we could go riding.

Bollocks, is what I have to say to that.

Our plans today had been to tackle the 30km Brumby Run described on thedirtydozen.com.au website, but it became pretty obvious, pretty quickly, that that wasn't going to happen ...

So we went for a plan B instead which can be best described as let's see where we can get to.

The only cleared track was around the lake (Rocky Valley Storage) which is above the village, and despite the map showing it didn't go all the way around, on the ground it looked like it sort of did, so we sort of thought let's give it a try, or maybe I just said to Bec "follow me" assuming that she'd read into that "let's see if we can get around this lake".  

Regardless, she followed so was equally to blame for what followed.

The first few kilometres out to the bottom of the Big Dipper tow was pretty well cleared, but after that we were on our own ...

 

We started playing around with our tyre pressure (I got down to 10psi at one point) and riding style (smooth and steady with no power strokes) to keep moving through the snow and it made a huge difference ... until the sun continued to heat up and the icy crust collapsed.  After that the only thing that made any difference was pushing the bikes.

We got around to some pumping station or something and that's where the track ended, but unperturbed my GPS and the map showed a 'path' continued on around the lake a bit higher up and so we headed for that ...

Fifteen minutes later, after hauling our bikes through a creek and soft snow we discovered that the path we were looking for was just a XC ski trail, not the walking trail I had hoped for, and after much inner soul searching we made the only decision we could ... Fun has to take second place to the high altitude, slow recovery damage, that any further off track travels may have caused so we turned around and headed back to the car the way we came.

Just for the record we only walked on thick snow cover and caused no vegetation damage at all.

In contrast to this, I managed to destroy my favourite pump (it didn't like the cold and just disintegrated) and I think we may also have destroyed my tyre sidewalls playing with the low pressure riding ...

But who cares, we got to play in the snow and build snowmen.

That's a super cool day in anyone's books.

Bright Rail Trail

So here was the offer ... My cousin Bec was heading to Bright for a week, she was driving there from Hobart and had room in her car for my bike, she was willing to pick me up at Melbourne airport and she'd already booked and paid for the accommodation so all I would have to pay was an extra $20 a night to join her.  I had Kim's permission to go and I could pick up a return flight for under $200 return ...

Decision made ... I was going to Bright for a long weekend.  It was time to hunt down the remaining dirty dozen routes that alluded me last time I was up this way ...

... Although I almost didn't make it.  

You see when Kim and I had headed up to NSW the other weekend, we had had a disagreement about how long we needed to give ourselves to get up and get to the flight. I was advocating for what I'll call the 'efficient' approach, and Kim was advocating for the 'no, let's get there with more than three seconds to spare' approach.  We both agreed in the end that Kim was right by the simple expediency that she got up when she decided she needed to and turned all the lights in the house on.  I will concede that the result of this was that we got to the airport with no stress and plenty of time to spare.

This was, however, obviously a complete waste of my sleeping time, and hence I decided this time to show Kim how getting to an airport should be done, setting my alarm to go off 30 minutes before I needed to get to the off-site airport car parking, which I figured to be a 20 minute drive from home giving me 5 minutes to stumble into my car and 5 minutes up my sleeve for emergencies.  That's planning ... John style.

Content in this approach, I then went to bed at about 10pm ... and proceeded to toss and turn all night stressed out about missing my flight.  Fortunately this was a good thing because at a bit after 1am I suddenly realised something ... My flight was at 6am, I needed to be at the car park at 5am ... But I had planned off the flight time and had set my alarm for 5.20am.  Sh#t!

In a panic, I abandoned my principles quicker than a Eurovision finalist does a reveal, and reset my alarm for 4am ... then I set a second alarm for 3.45am just in case.

I finally got about 30 minutes of solid sleep, but more importantly I did get to the airport on time and onto my flight.

Once in Melbourne we had to abandon our plans to meet up with Kerry due to that horrible truck crash which gridlocked traffic, so instead of a lovely breakfast in the Rustic Duck Cafe .... We had McDonalds at a 24hr petrol station on the Hume highway, but we did make up for this with a much more relaxed lunch under the gorgeous autumn leaves at the Ginger Baker in Bright.

I was flagging a bit at this point, so we agreed to go out to our little mud brick cottage and settle in early (OK, so I needed to have a nana nap, get over it) before we headed out for an evening ride to check that the bikes were still working (mine hadn't been out of its bag since the Convict 100).

Now, confession here.  Many years ago when I first heard about the Murray to Mountains rail trail I was all gung ho to come and ride it, but then I'd headed up this way to ride the Dirty Dozen MTB routes and noticed that the rail route seemed to pretty much follow the highway the whole way, which led me to the conclusion that it was a pretty stupid idea.

I now think I may have been wrong.

You see, autumn is kind of at its peak here at the moment and our short 20km out and back tootle along the rail trail with the setting sun, the falling autumn leaves and the wonderful vines ... well it was blow you away beautiful.

Oh, and the fungi.  Can't forget the fungi.

I'm still not convinced that I'd enjoy spending two days cycling the whole route, but I certainly re-tract my uneducated earlier opinion that it would just be boring, especially at this time of year.  Even being so close to the highway couldn't detract from the ride, in fact I barely noticed the traffic the whole time.

What I did notice was the way that my bike gears were still skipping badly on the downstroke on the right side, and an inspection out by the Boyneton vineyard turned up an unwelcome surprise ... My bike hadn't faired so well in transit with three broken teeth on the big front sprocket and, more critically, one bent and broken spoke on the middle sprocket which was causing the skipping.

Frick.

Still the hills were here, the trails were here, and I was here ... There's only one thing a rambler can really do when those set of circumstances conspire ... go play, and pay for the damage later.

Looking forward to tomorrow, big time.