http://www.ambmag.com.au - 47Visitors to Thredbo have always benefitted from
the village’s proud tradition of keeping its lift
open year-round, and that lift was fitted with
bike racks in 2014. While seasoned downhillers
will be perfectly comfortable swinging in an
open chair 30 metres above the ground with a 20
kilogram bike on their laps, the rest of us aren’t.
Visitors can also expect lodges equipped with
bike racks and bike washing stations, and a
range of accommodation options, from self-
contained apartments to camping.
With the Village ready to welcome riders, Diver
believes it’s just a matter of time.
‘I believe, as they say, if you build the trails they
will come. Right now, on a peak day we lift 250
riders, I’d like to get that to about 750 riders a day
in the next five years. My aim is that we’ll get to
the point where we’ll have run out of capacity for
the [main lift] Kosciusko Express and we’ll have to
run other chairs.’
You can expect more events at Thredbo in future,
too, but Diver’s adamant that trails will stay open
for everyone, which means limiting racing on the
mountain.
‘The events are good, but we’ve limited it to one
event a month because we want the mountain to
be open for guests to ride on,’ he says.
‘We’re looking at bringing in the new all-mountain
trail, along with the Cannonball downhill and
the Flow Trail and doing a really unique six-hour
enduro, and we’re also looking at bringing the
Village into the Cannonball Festival next year with
an urban downhill, depending on the cost.’In the near future, it’s likely that the NSW Snowys
will climb the podium as one Australia’s top MTB
destinations. It’s also likely that you won’t need
a car to take in a huge variety of singletrack in
vastly different natural settings. You’ll be able to
start at 1900 metres above sea level on Thredbo’s
alpine gravity trails and finish 1,000 metres below
at Jindabyne. You can begin with the spectacular
new all-mountain trail at Thredbo and on the
way down take in the rare beauty of the Thredbo
Valley Trail, maybe stopping for lunch at Lake
Crackenback’s superb restaurants and rolling
through its peaceful riverside trails.Then you could head down to Jindabyne and cruise
out to Bungarra’s 20 kilometres of dry, twisty race
track and after a rest stop in town, you could head
east around Lake Jindabyne to the impressive
dam wall and hit up the place where it all started,
Tyrolean Village’s steep and technical hand-built
singletrack. Then, in future years, there’s the
possibility of looping back around the entire lake,
experiencing sunset over the water, abundant
bird and native wildlife. If this sounds exhausting,
that’s because you’d cover at least 300 kilometres
of purpose-built trail. And you’ll probably want to
ride most of it more than once.