The unintentional mountain biking holiday.

When I left Natimuk, it was 41 degrees. By the time I’m on the ferry to Tassie, it’s howling winds and rain the whole way. I tried to go out on the deck, but as the wind was about to pick me up and blow me off the boat, I thought better of it. Thus rather than a glorious birthday lounging on the deck of a boat staring at the ocean, mine was lounging in a chair looking out the windows at the ocean.

The ferry was running late, I stopped for shopping in Deloraine, I scoffed down some food and kept on driving towards Derby. I consider stopping for the night, but decided I can drive a little further and thus find myself on the winding road over the range between Launceston and Scotsdale a bit after 11, mists floating across the road, when what looks like a young girl from Picnic at Hanging Rock crawls out of the bushes. Then I see a car overturned off the side of the road and I think her family must be stuck in the vehicle as I pull off the road thinking fuck, fuck, fuck …. She turns out to be the driver of the car and there is no one else in it. She’s trying to call 000 but failing and I take the phone and tell them where we are. I can’t find any injuries on her, but she has hit her head, is hysterical, drunk, possibly drugged and confused about her evening. I can’t tell if that’s intoxication or head injury. I settle her in the van with me and reassure her whilst we wait. With great relief that my birthday has not ended with a major trauma scene, I hand her over to the paramedics and drive on. Extremely cautiously.

I wake in Derby to blue skies and settle in for a coffee at the café whilst I wait for Simey to make it over after his attempts to hook up in Launceston. By the time he arrives just after 9, the blue sky has gone. Still, we head out to the car to shuttle up to Blue Tier and it starts raining. We go back in the café and stare morosely at the radar. It doesn’t seem to have much chance of improving, so we decide to just head out anyway. We drop a car at Weldborough pub and continue up. Simey tells me the trails at Derby are better than those at Forrest. I’m a little dubious. The trails at Forrest are pretty bloody good, and Simey hasn’t exactly done a lot of riding. Plus he was here with his favourite squeeze, so he was probably just having an overall awesome time.

We get out at Blue Tier and it’s not quite as bleak as we expected.  There isn’t snow for a change. I always get snowed on in Tassie. We rug up for the ride and head out on an undulating trail with a few techy features through beautiful alpine meadows. 

It gets wilder, windier and wetter. My glasses need windscreen wipers and demisters. But the trail is awesome. We drop into fairytale like myrtle forests and over gorgeous trickling creeks. We slide sideways on a fair few wet tree roots.

A tree is down over the path and I get one of those delightful short person moments watching someone of 6 foot 5 crawl under a tree. 

Then we hit the main descent, and it just goes on and on and on, gorgeous flowing bermed corners, into rainforest and weaving between giant tree ferns. When we get to the bottom, I think it must be nearly over, but Simey assures me we go up, and then there's another fantastic descent.

It gets muddier. Sloshing through puddles, sliding out and flying off the bike, what mud hadn’t come up at me, I went down to it. I try riding without my glasses. I could actually see better, but then I get an eye full of mud and get them back out again.  It’s the most fun I’ve ever had getting muddy and saturated. I might not have been so enthusiastic about it had I gotten cold. Not a single layer came off in all that riding. 

We pull over at the river at the end and decide we are so wet, we may as well jump in the river with all our clothes on to get the mud off. We throw the bikes in as well. I didn’t throw my phone in, but it seems to have objected to either flying with me off the bike, or getting a bit too muddy as well and has seized up. Simey has also seized up and needs a little nanna nap in the car before he can make it back to Derby for shower, beer and dinner.

I don’t have the delights of a car shuttle the next day, as Simey is off on the ferry, so I start from the trail head at Derby ready to slog up the hill. The climbs are incredibly well crafted though, and I weave up hair pins and the height is gained easily. For a while. Still climbing 5 k later, I know about height gain now. The upper trails are more techy and I’m grunting over rock steps and working really rather hard. I am a bit chuffed to overtake 3 people pushing their bikes though. At about 8k, I get to the top. The down is fast, techy and exciting almost straight away, with sections of armouring, rock steps and steep corners. All that height disappears far too quickly, then I traverse across the hillside to the bit of fireroad called Heartbreak Hill. I’m not going to be heartbroken by it. I completely expect to come off the bike before the top. I’m thrilled at each little section I make it through, getting to a less steep bit and attempting to still my racing heart in the tiny respite before the next. I’m not sure if it’s my head or my heart that gives up on the second last rise. My stubbornness isn’t quite as good at suffering on the bike as it is at suffering on the rock. 

The single track continues around the dam, undulating that seems to err on the side of up. I smash the derailer into a boulder and come off. So has the chain. And the derailler doesn’t look quite right. But by time I’ve faffed with it a bit, it all seems to be working again, so onward forth.

The descent is wild. The berms are massive, and tight, steep corners weave down, one after another after another. I fly (complete with the bike today) over jumps, launch down steep granite slabs and drop offs and I adore my bike. Seriously, I just point her at anything and as long as I can stay on the bike, she gets me down them. I skid to at stop at them bottom and have just exclaimed how mindblowing that descent was to absolutely no one when someone comes down the trail behind me and does exactly the same thing.

Somewhere in here, I realise that my improvised top tube bag has come undone and all my beautifully cut into bite size pieces of fruit bar have gone. Lack of food seems a good reason to bail off the extended loop back to the car. The climbing in it might have influenced me as well, I howl down Howler, and find myself riding through the Derby Tunnel. Caving on a bike is weird. I’m riding haunched low on the bike as I’m afraid I’ll bash my head on the ceiling and focus on riding towards the light at the other end. I’m really not fond of caving …

As I’m eating lunch by the car, I start chatting with a collection of guys besides me. They have a 5 bike shuttle and there are only 3 of them … It’s not hard to sweet talk your way into a ride back up to the top when you are one about only 3 women on the trails. I throw my stuff together for another run in a rush. As I roll out from the drop off, I feel trashed. Riding up the hill again seems a very distant possibility. But as I only have to roll down, life is good. The ongoing themes of massive berms, incredible flowy descent and techy rock gardens continue. I’m super excited every time I get through one, and again rather chuffed to roll past 2 people walking their bikes. I stagger back to camp where I contemplate yet another set of muddy shorts and realise that I don’t own enough bike shorts to ride in Tasmania.

The next day, Abby and I are meeting at Fingal to climb, but she has a few things to do on the road, so I think about getting another quick ride in. When I am offered company on the trails (via some therapeutic Tindering), the deal is set and Will and I do some sneaky shuttles up to the drop off point above town. The trails at Derby are never really giveaway downhills though, so even after shuttling, we have 3k of climbing track to the highest point on the trails. Will is a bit of a biking machine, so it’s good for me that his long travel bike is out of action and he’s riding his cross country bike. I’m still working at my limit to keep up with him. As we fly over rocks and whoop around beautifully cambered corners, it’s impossible to grin enough. Then we are back in the centre of town. Abby is happily slacklining at Aspley so we drive up for another run. After all the gnarly riding I’ve been doing, I’m a bit lax at concentrating on the final easy corner down to the river, loose my front tyre in gravel and peel off the side onto my shoulder. Shoulders have become the bane of my life in the past 8 years. We sit by the river and chat for half an hour and it seems ok to ride back down. To my great relief, I can still ride, although I feel it twinge when I pull myself forward on the bike. We retire to beer drinking. A bad news call to Abby reveals that she hurt her knee slacklining as well. Maybe we were both trying to do too much of a good thing. We decide resting at Derby for a day and trying an easy ride the next is the way forward.

In the way that Natimukians (or ex-Natimukians in this case) appear everywhere, I bumped into Callum and Kit at the trailhead. They hadn’t been able to get a shuttle space up Blue Tier, so I volunteer my rest day services as chauffeur, then settle in at the Weldborough pub to wait for them. The publican even insists I don’t have to pay for my latte. They rock up an hour and a half later with the expected jubilation. Callum had come off the bike a couple of times due to being more focussed on looking for fish in the streams then riding the bike. We stuff ourselves with food and beer and Kit is keen for the next leg back to Derby, so even though the voice of wisdom in Callum says he is climbing tomorrow and he’s already done 3 days riding, the voice of enthusiasm wins out and I drop them at the Atlas trailhead (that was 6k of uphill they missed out on at least) and tootle back to play games with Abby at camp. The back road from Atlas trail head to Derby passes through active logging areas, reminding me that Tasmania is still a battlefield of logging, environmentalists and ecotourism.

Mountain biking has really transformed Derby. We say that climbing saved Natimuk, and it did, but it didn’t do anything compared with the impact of mountain biking on Derby in less than 5 years. With a population of 173 in the 2016 census, it now has 2 pubs, 2 cafes, a pizza bar, a food caravan, 3 bike stores, a plethora of shuttle companies, multiple free camping areas with facilities, a general store and a few oddities like the school house museum and lapidary club. New buildings are all over the place, and whilst I expect that population has gone up, they seem to mostly be holiday accommodation. The town is in a pretty spot by the river and is generally rather nice to hang out in. Tasmania seems rather slow to catch on to meat free eating though, and whilst the food is pretty swish, the vego options are a bit like it was being vego in the 90s. Despite this dietary timewarp, everywhere is incredibly friendly. They claim the mountain biking attracts 30 000 visitors per year, each staying 4-5 days and brings $30 million dollars a year to Derby. $1000 per person seemed a little optimistic at first, but I guess those are my travelling standards. If you pay for accommodation, bike hire, shuttles, food and the inevitably large quantity of beer, I guess it gets to $1000 pretty easily. What climber spends $1000 per visit in Nati? 

My trip appears to have turned into an exclusively mountain biking trip, which is a first. I have to admit Simey was right - the trails at Derby are a step up from Forrest. I hate admitting when Simey is right, so it's fortunate he isn't right very often. Abby and I brave our injuries on a gentle ride around the lake, then commit to the trail up the hill. It’s all fine.

We grab some lunch and launch out on the trails again. It’s amazing what injury denial will do for you. Abby gets complimented on her retro bike. She bought it in 2002. That’s still 20 years more recent than her van.We end up eating rhubarb and custard calzone in the pizza bar playing speed scrabble.

We commit our broken bodies to the ride from Blue Tier back into Derby the next day. The start is in the cloud when we leave my van at the top. I make 3 false starts down the trail for things I’ve forgotten, like my phone that I left resting on a rock. Then we are off, and whilst the logs are still slippery, it is nothing like it was on Sunday. Although I’m kinda glad I had the Sunday experience. It was fun.

We stop for lunch at the Weldborough pub, along with a hoard of others. It must be the busiest pub lunch in rural Tasmania! Almost everybody is shuttling up to the start of Atlas from here. One of the guys on the shuttle tells us there’s heaps of space, we could just ask if we can get a lift, but we are committed to the suffering. We launch up the dirt road, and aside from waving flies out of my face constantly to avoid breathing them in, it’s fine, and I arrive at the trailhead 4 km up the road and lounge around waiting for Abby. It is supposed to be 6 km to the trailhead, but here we are. A logging truck drives by and considerately slows down to a crawl past me. A ute inconsiderately fangs past, sending dust everywhere.

The single track weaves steeply up the hill just out of the trailhead, then meanders back out of the forest onto another road. Hmm … The road becomes outrageously steep and as I spin up it at about 0.001kph, I am about to blow a foofer valve when I top out and find another trailhead. Sorry Callum and Kit, I left you climbing those hills too … Still Trailforks doesn’t even show a road going here, so who knows how to find it. 

Like all the “downhill” trails I’ve done here, Atlas doesn’t let you escape without a bit of climbing, and the trail undulates before a steep descent to join Dambusters. Sweeping berms alternate with gnarly rock gardens, and a few drops that are definitely not blue. Mountain biking needs some more grades. It’s a bit like early climbing grading systems. They don’t work so well. I’m voting for yellow, green, turquoise, blue, navy, grey, black. Double black seems a little like the climbing grades of Hard Very Severe or 5.10 a, b, c and d. Someone is going to ride something even more dire one day, just as someone is going to climb something even harder, so just move onto to the next step instead of pretending this is the end of the line! Try adding purple, rainbow or baby pink! We catch up with the group of guys who were the only others to ride up to Atlas. I ask if they are as trashed as I am. They are, but they are still riding the St Helens trail the next day. We aren’t. There is a couch in Derby with our name on it.

We stagger back to Abby’s van having survived 40km, with 600m up and 1500m down. Whilst driving back up to pick up my van, we admit we are not going to cook tonight and book at the pizza bar. Blue Tier is still in cloud when we get back to my van. At the pizza bar, we catch up with the other 3 girls out on the trail today – we were still well outnumbered by the 3 busloads or so of men on the trail as well, but there are a few other women out here. They too are riding to St Helens the next day. We are not diverted from our couch mission.

Abby’s bike gets still more attention as I watch a guy checking it out from my van. My bike is locked in front of it, and he’s obviously trying to peer around it. Who cares about fancy modern bikes when  there’s an old school Santa Cruz around? Abby’s loving it, and swears it rides beautifully. We play a bunch of speed scrabble and 5 second rule. We are both crap at pop culture. Seriously, 3 Adele songs? Who the hell is Adele? By the end of the trip, we know every card in the deck, but we still don’t know a single Adele song.

The next day, Abby has to catch the evening ferry, and the retro van travels slowly, so we are up early (ish) to get a ride in before she has to leave. We ride up the usual trails, down to where they all converge at the mid point, then veer out east to the only non-black trail I hadn’t yet done here. I didn’t dare try the black trails, there were exciting enough bits on the blues. Derby seems to run hard grades. I chatted with one guy who had just done one of the double blacks about what the harder trails were like. He said he wouldn’t really call them fun. As the blue trails here are definitely the most fun you could ever have on 2 wheels, I didn’t feel like I was missing out too much.

Krushka’s is another awesome trail, equal parts climbing and descent, and I take the time to practice some techy sections whilst Abby caught up. I didn’t really expect to be waiting for Abby. Abby is a machine at everything she does, and she’d done a lot of riding previously. But she hadn’t been on the bike much since moving to Natimuk, which isn’t exactly the mountainbiking capital of Victoria. Plus the knee, plus she kept wanting to look at the views, and then of course, she had to identify some birds.

The trail whoops back down with typical sweeping berms for miles in between some exciting rock gardens. Rock gardens sound so gentle. Just like a few decorative pebbles. These are not decorative pebbles. They are chunky and convoluted piles of granite, with drops, jumps, wheel catching grooves and step ups. At the end of the trail, we whip down our usual way, until I spy a trail not marked on the map and figure I’ll go for an explore. It’s a divinely smooth series massive berms and roller coasters, in perfect condition and just made to hoon down. I hoon. Abby missed me disappearing down it, and we don’t find each other again until the trail head. Some food is scoffed and Abby has to hit the road. I hit the trail again, with another loop to the top and down my newly discovered hoonfest. Whilst dutifully scanning strava that evening, I am excited to discovered I am the third fastest down that trail. Some things are irresistible, you know. Of course I had to go back the next day.

Monday morning however started with a meltdown. Things just do their building up kinda thing and all my amazing coping I had been doing came to an end. Work were being shits. Centrelink were being shits. I’d been dumped by my boyfriend. Well, ok, we’d only been dating 3 weeks or so, but being dumped sucks anyway. There was Douglas stuff, house stuff, stuff stuff … I’d lined up some quality Tindering, but Will’s work meant that the distraction of wild riding and wild sex failed to eventuate. Well, at least there was still the wild riding. I had a comforting chat with my Mum (seriously, how do people cope without their Mum? I’ve just turned 46 and I still turn to her) and decided to head home. The weather was turning that afternoon anyway. I went out for the wild riding and made an attempt to emulate the sort of kilometres and climbing I’d be doing on the Otway Odyssey. Since the break up, I’d decided to abandon the Odyssey, then decided to do it anyway, then changed my mind back again more times than I care to count. So I was at least making an effort at training for the Odyssey whilst I vacillated. I rode the single track to the top, then the mixed trail down the far side, back up the dirt road, down to the mid point, up again then all the way down to the trailhead. 29k. 800m of climbing. Not a bad emulation. And I scored Queen of the Mountain on the hoonfest.

It’s starting to rain as I get back to the van. I throw the bike in still grotty, in fact, everything has really just been thrown in since my impromptu decision to go home tonight.

It’s always reassuring about your decision to leave to have the weather crap out at the right time. I’ve booked a cabin on the ferry for the first time in my life, and the first thing I do on board is jump in the shower. A shower and a bed. It’s unheard of luxury. Unfortunately, one of the other women in the cabin snored, and one of my ear plugs had fallen out and disappeared into the depth of the bedding. Still, it was the best ferry crossing I’ve ever had.

The management of the ferry seem to think we need a lot of time to get up in the morning, and they give a wake up announcement at 6. I groan, and decided more sleep is not going to happen, throw my stuff together and hunt out coffee. They are doing a roaring trade. Sometime in the midst of killing time queuing for the ferry and getting pizza, I’d done some more therapeutic online dating. Thus I headed straight off the ferry to have breakfast with yet another mountain biker. Certainly, I have picked a good obsession for meeting men in. We grab brekky, talk bikes and riding a lot then Charles heads on a riding trip to Thredbo, whilst I head off to ride the Odyssey course. I have decided to toughen up, heart break is not a good reason to abandon a race you have been intending to do for 6 months.

It is a bit triggering, rocking up at the rec reserve. The other time I’d ridden the course had been training with Andrew. Although, that was more me training than him training, as he would ride laps up and down the hills whilst I spun on in granny gear. But if there’s any way to get emotional bullshit out of your system, it’s heading straight into 3.8k up a hill. It in fact fuelled me to my fastest time up that hill. By the time I’m on the glorious flowing descent, I’m not thinking about Andrew. I’m have a raucous time flying downhill. Sometimes I wonder if all those years of climbing have given me a skewed sense of fear. But I love fast downhill.  Occasionally I think about how much it would hurt to come off at this speed, but that is a fleeting thought amidst wild grins. There’s a woman in the track just after the final jump and I yell “excuse me” as I come round, and she zips out of the way in time for me to launch out of the track and back into boring dirt road slogging. Have I mentioned dirt roads are not my favourite riding? But the last bit back down to the rec reserve is gloriously fast … again not thinking too closely about coming off at 50kph.

I have a second bidon on the van to swap over on the way back through the reserve, in good practice for racing, but I’ve barely touched my first one. I take a big swig and grab the second anyway, because it seems sensible, and head over to the Yaugher forest.  More dirt road slogging gives way to the Super Loop, which despite it’s super status, I still manage to miss a turn and have a brief back track. I thought I had the route here sussed, but maybe not. I motor down Foxtail, go the wrong way back on the Super loop (that is the actual race route, not my mistake this time, but I was hoping no one would come riding in the other direction at a great pace) then my least favourite section of the race takes these horrible chunky gravel roads through pine plantation. This was part of the changes to the course this year to eliminate some of the climb up Kangalang Rd. I would much rather climb up Kangalang and do more of Red Carpet down, but here we are, bouncing away on fist sized gravel that is both uncomfortable and a little scary that your front wheel will slide out when one moves unexpectedly under you.

There’s a great mystery in the course about how it regains the Super Loop. I’ve tried to find it 4 times now. Twice, I just carried my bike through the scrub. Who said this was adventure racing? The other, I took a fire trail that regains the loop further on. I do that again, but miss the point where it regains the loop. But as the course regains the firetrail a few hundred metres later, I just keep going. After this fire road, it heads down Vista, which has a steep, straight single track heading down for what seems like ages. It’s really just a matter of the size of your stupidity gland how fast you go down it. My stupidity gland seems fairly large. What goes down must come up however, and Vista does it with a horrible sandy climb that surely no one will actually be able to ride. Certainly I won’t. I jump off and start pushing as soon as it seems like the more efficient means of upwards progress.

The next section of Vista is the crux of the race. Do rides have cruxes? Am I confabulating my obsessions? It’s a long climb that starts with some techy steps over tree roots that I am thrilled to get over, but then it just goes and goes and goes and …. still goes. I knew it did that, but nevertheless, I would get sucked into to thinking this rise or that corner was the last. It’s cruel stuff near the end of a race. And it’s at the 5k from the end mark for both the 30 and 50k races. Granny gear is fully engaged until I am going so slowly that it’s hard to maintain balance. Plus I’m about to blow that foofer valve again. Seriously, I need to train this foofer valve a bit more. I give in and walk a couple of metres and jump back on in a slight slackening of the angle. Again I’m not sure when it’s my mind or my body giving up. I haven’t done enough riding to know when it’s the “fuck it, just get off the bike” winning out yet.

Vista weaves tightly through grass trees on the descent, and it’s one of those times I’m glad that I’m short and on an extra small bike. Somewhere I come across council workers with a broken down ride on mower in the middle of the trail. I push around them then my bike breaks down. I’ve knocked the chain off. I throw it back on again with no care for how greasy my gloves get and get to the final bit of inglorious slogging before the final descent into the rec reserve.  I pull up by the van after 2 hrs and 14 minutes of riding. I’m pretty ecstatic with that. Strava thinks I’ve done 1.5k and 187m more climbing than the course should be. I ducked the bike under a gate, got lost once, walked the bike around a mower, threw a chain and I’m still within 15 minutes of the winning times in previous years. There’s a pretty big grin on my face as I start the drive home.