Posted by Locals are legendary.
A few minutes with a local and a map at a trailhead can be worth ten times the time spent with the best maps or track notes by yourself, and that’s why Kim and I were so lucky when we rocked up at Blores Hill MTB park to find a single car parked there (albeit that we later found out that a new ‘official’ car park has been built around the corner from where it was shown on our map … but that also had nobody in it so is probably irrelevant to this story).
A few minutes after we pulled up a lone cyclist came in off the trails, so I say hello, and we get talking about the trails and soon enough the maps out on the front of the car and he’s plotting a recommended route for our afternoon ride.
He also noted something I’d missed … that it was already pretty late. In fact due to late flights and GyPSy’s usual interesting route choices, it was already 3pm when we pulled up, and given it was still over an hours drive to Bairnsdale, where we hope to find somewhere to stay the night, we really didn’t have time to ride the full 20kms+ of trail in the park.
So he showed us what he’d ride if he just had an hour, and also cautioned us about the trig track as being pretty technical and somewhere we might want to avoid if we didn’t like technical riding.
Now the great thing about Kim is she is completely disinterested in routes and directions and distances and so she was completely ambivalent to the fact that I was pretty much bee-lining us straight to the technical stuff to see what ‘technical’ riding looks like in Victoria.
That said, the only way to ‘bee-line” our way to the technical stuff was to ride everything else in between and we had a smashing good time riding around fast, smooth, flowing track (our local legend had told us that there is a another local guy who has some injury, so he regularly walks all the tracks clearing them – I’d crown that guy a saint and vote him in as Mayor of my town if he did that in Tassie).
The Trig track was a wee bit technical, but only for a very short distance (and they’d even put down carpet on one of the climbs to help you out).
The switchbacks and trails after that were heaven and it really was a hard decision as to whether to continue on into the dark or head back to the car when it came that time because we were enjoying ourselves so much.
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| Pretty little area. |
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| Smooth flowing tracks, some nice small berms when you want them. |
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| Heading up to trig track. |
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| Trig track. |
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| Kim waiting for me at the top |
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| Kim … not so sure about one of the small drops. |
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| … but she rides it anyway because she’s super awesome. |
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| The sign says it all “switchback heaven” |
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| Switchbacks |
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| … and even a few little man made bridges. |
All up we only rode about 10km (so probably half the trails) but we were both buzzing when we got back to the car and would have happily spent another hour there riding the rest of the trails if time had allowed.