Category: Pine Rivers

The “Super-V” is a popular mountain biking loop in D’Aguilar National Park. It gets its name from the “V” shaped elevation profile as you drop steeply down to the England Creek Valley from Mount Glorious, then slowly have to ride up an equally steep road to get out. It’s loops like that which inspired the famous Mountain Biking adage: “What goes down must come up”. I.e. whenever you enjoy a long ride down, you’ll have to pay for it with a long ride back up.

Wayne and I started this mid-week ride from Maiala Park at Mount Glorious. It was cold, humid, foggy and a misty rain was falling, but we were still able to see the sun poking through the clouds as we looked down the mountain towards the coast.

Lawton Road has been closed for over two years. Much of it was washed away in the floods of 2011, and park workers have only just recently repaired all the landslips.

Where once there were huge chasms in the road, now there are large mounds of gravel where the graders and dozers have rebuilt the road. I doesn’t look pretty, but I think it will probably last a bit longer in a storm than the last road. All it needs is a few months of sunny weather to cook the surface, and it’ll be perfect.

At the moment, so soon after re-construction, and after wet weather, the surface is boggy in places, which made the steep climb up to Northbrook Mountain a little more challenging. Needless to say, Wayne beat me to the top.

I didn’t even realize this bush camp at Northbrook Mountain was here. It’s a gorgeous little campsite on the top of the mountain, on a turn-off about 500 metres past the Lawton Road water tank. There’s even a visitors book you can fill out (which we both did).

The long ride down England Creek Road is wonderful – and the views are…. well look for yourself! Amazing!

I know it looks like it, but we weren’t doing a “Bush Camp Crawl”. It’s just that the England Creek Bush Camp was about half-way, and we both felt like a bite to eat 🙂

And from there we slowly made our way up Joyners Ridge Road. I explained the origin of the name to Wayne. You can read about why it’s so named here. Wayne also kindly tolerated my rendition of Banjo’s “Clancy of the Overflow” as we rode up the trail. It’s very hard to recite a poem while you’re out of breath, but it takes your mind off the climbing!

We travelled 23 km in just under 3 hours, during which we climbed 930m and I burned 1,500 kcal. If you don’t have much time (like during the week) this is a great little loop. I’ll give it 7.5 out of 10 on the tough-o-meter. The cool moist weather made it a very comfortable ride.

Thanks for the great company, Wayne!

My friend, Neil B, regularly organizes group social rides on Saturday afternoons. This week, he wanted to visit House Mountain, near Samford. I hadn’t ever ridden there before, so I jumped at the chance to explore some new trails with a large friendly group of people.

For this ride, about 14 of us met at the “Jurassic” car park at Bunyaville, and started out towards Samford State Forest, a couple of kilometres to the South West…

Samford State Forest (Most of us call it “Ironbark” for short) has a lot more hills than Bunyaville. Today we slowly made our way to the high point up the “Three Sisters” track. I think it’s called this because of the three “humps” you have to grind up on your way to the top. They’re not difficult, but as with most climbs, they slow you down a bit, and tend to spread out a group of riders.

We then enjoyed a quick (80 km/h) roll down Burns Road on our way to the rail trail north of Samford. This part of railway line is popular because of the old tunnel at the end, affectionately known as “The Bat Cave“. The trail is used by horse riders, joggers, walkers and mountain bikers, and is a pleasant way to head north from Samford without having to go on busy Mount Samson road.

It’s always fascinating to peer into the “cave” through the fence, provided you don’t mind bats, or snakes 🙂

But the real challenge of the ride is House Mountain, just behind the Bat Cave. It has some very steep climbs – some of which we had to push the bikes up….


…but it also has some very steep descents, which are a lot of fun to ride down, before shooting out into a green paddock at the bottom.

We then followed some pony trails along (and across) the South Pine River back to Samford, before retracing our tracks back to Bunyaville. At some times of the year, this river crossing is impassable. Thankfully we haven’t had much rain recently, so it was easy to cross.

Because I wanted a longer ride, I started from my place, which stretched it out to about 70km over 5 and a half hours (including breaks), with about 1,300m of ascent and just over 4,000 kcal. The more sensible route (from Bunyaville) is about 30km in length with about 750m of ascent, and takes about 3 hours including breaks. It rates about 8 out of 10 on the tough-o-meter.