Thanks Glen, Steve and Harrison for a great ride around Cashmere State Forest this morning. Everyone put in a great effort.
Q. “What do you call the bottom of a hill with 35% gradient”
A. “A hole”.
Some of those hills were pretty steep. The camera seems to flatten them out – they’re much more acute than they look in the picture.
I had another try at climbing Old School Road today. I did better than last time, but still haven’t beat the hill. My poor bike is a geared a bit too high, but I hope I’ll eventually conquer it if I don’t surrender!
From there it was a brisk ride down the other side of the mountain maxing out at 70km/h, and another beautiful ride along Bunya Road to the single tracks in Bunyaville State Forest.
I’ve lived in South East Queensland for over 45 years, and I think I’ve taken it for granted for most of my life. This place is paradise. I love it.
Clear Mountain is about a 15km ride from my front door. All of the roads up it are pretty steep, but today I thought I’d try giving one of the more difficult dirt roads a try. It was pretty good going most of the way until I was about 100m from the top. Then the gradient increased quite markedly. I was determined not to give up, and kept pushing, but the wheels stopped turning. As you can see from the video, when your wheels stop turning, you end up kissing dirt 🙂
I’ll be trying this one regularly over the next few weeks until I beat it.
My mate Steve has ridden up it a few times. And there’s no way I’m going to let him own that hill by himself!
Ken and I rode out to Redcliffe to meet everyone else for a picnic. It was a perfect day for it.
For someone who hasn’t ridden more than 10-15km at a time, Ken handled this 60km ride really well.
I think all the nice food at the picnic might have helped too!
Where do you take a friend who hasn’t been on a bike for a long time?
I wanted to have a fun ride this morning, but didn’t want to do anything too hardcore because I like my friends, and don’t want to scare them off. After some poring over Google Maps (I do that a lot), I came up with a compromise that was mostly off-road, had a couple of good hills, and got us back home within two hours.
And we all survived to ride again!
I’m amazed at Glen’s quick eyes. We’d only just got off the bikes at this river crossing and he spotted a 30cm (1 foot) catfish swimming around in the mirky water.
It had a few skin marks which Glen reckons might have been from being swept over the dam wall in recent flooding.
Well spotted!
This causeway had a nasty 50cm drop at one end, which is ok for hardcore riders, but not much for everyone else.
We found a few stray rocks and put them near the drop to make it easier to traverse.
I think Harrison was a bit skeptical at my handiwork. Although you can’t see it, he did finally manage to ride over it.
All up 22km in 1 hour 45 minutes, 300m total climbing, 1500 calories.
Well Bellbirds and Whipbirds, actually.
I stopped along Bunya Road while cycling this morning so I could record some of the sounds of the birds singing in the forest.
I think they sound great, and I’m really glad I took the time to stop and listen.
The actual ride was great too – up the side of Clear Mountain along a dirt track, down Bunya Road, and through the state forest trails that run off the Jinker track.
A really enjoyable morning ride!
In the last post I told you about our ride down the Lepidozamia track. Here’s the video from my helmet cam. It’s bumpy, but as you can see, it was a lot of fun.
Last week I explained our quest to find a track from Mount Glorious down to Kobble Creek. This week we found it, thanks to some advice from the guys at MTBDirt.com.au.
It was a difficult ride climbing the D’Aguilar Range to its summit of almost 800m at Mount Tension Woods, and then an exhilarating ride down some very steep rocky fire trails (The Lepidozamia Track) as we followed Kobble Creek back to civilization.
The Lepidozamia Track is named after all the Cycads (Lepidozamia peroffskyana) that grow there.
All up we rode about 66km with a total ascent / descent of about 1550m. The total ride was about 10 hours because we had to keep stopping – Simon got half a dozen punctures and we went through three spare tubes and half a roll of duct tape before we fixed it.
I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn’t taken 4 spare tubes and three rolls of duct tape. If ever I needed justification for carrying so much “Stuff” on my rides, this is it. We were in some pretty remote country, and getting out on foot would have taken a long time.
This ride covers some beautiful scenery. Normally we’d be able to do it in about 5 hours, and it’s worth the effort if you don’t mind getting your feet wet!
