Day 1: 125km, 2800m.
Temperature inversion. Barrow.
Break out the biscuits. Golden hour.
In high spirits and a little bit nervous we
commenced our adventure on a brisk May
morning in Evandale. May in the North East
can make a good show of pretending to be
winter, so we are lucky to have four days of
spectacular weather conditions forecast.
Although we have been back and forth via
social media messages and email, it is nice to
finally meet people in person. Being from the
North East of Tassie we know of each other with
only the smallest degrees of freedom common
here. Any of these days in isolation would be
a spectacular ride, let alone strung together,
however our focus for today is to make it
“From here it is a flat 10km roll on the only sealed road we had seen all day to
our destination for the day, the Bay of Fires. Bay of Fires is so named not after the
ruddy lichen on its granite rock but because of the fires of the Aboriginals spotted
by Tobias Furneaux as he sailed past in 1773.”
unscathed to Derby via one of the major
climbs waiting for us, Mt Barrow.
Mt Barrow or Pialermeliggener is a Jurassc
dolerite-capped plateau about 30km
outside Launceston that reaches a maximum
elevation of 1,406 metres making it the second
highest peak in this area. The climb to the
top is a 14km gravel road through temperate
old-growth rainforest, subalpine and alpine
landscapes, with the final switch backs
doggedly clinging to the mountain as they
top out through imposing scree slopes. As Ben
Lomond’s less famous sibling (more on that
later), to me it is has the best combination of
switchback corners and long gravel ramps, a
heart breaker to climb and a joy to descend.
One bitter temperature inversion and manyfast rolling kilometres later we roll across the
aptly named Paradise Plains before descending
through a golden hour landscape painting
into the farming community of Ringarooma.
From there we are shuttled to the mountain
bike capital of the North East, Derby. Anyone
who has recently flicked a dropper post lever
or railed a berm in Australia and perhaps the
world has likely heard the tale of this town.
The Derby trail network is a joint initiative
between the local councils of Dorset and Break
O’Day and the Federal government to breathe
new life into this once thriving tin mining town.
The 110km of world class mountain biking trail
has put Derby on the map for those who roll
on knobby tires. But beyond the singletrack a
lattice of gravel and fire roads extends throughTHE SPIRIT OF GRAVELGravel biking with
an MTB twist.