you may feel i am being dramatic here and i’d probably agree but you were not there and you didn’t see that razor sharp lip of a lander hell bent on putting a rather final dent in my favourite carbon fibre wheel loom large. so i distinctly remember pulling up hard on what i hoped…
that’s the enduro spirit. plus of course the idea that the trails should be fun, challenging but also require a certain level of fitness and the willingness to dig deep to be fast. for the last gravity enduro (ge) of the season the club in ourimbah really went all out. stage 1 was the downhill,…
if you think derby is a bit out of the way wait until you are trying to get to maydena. once you leave hobart you don’t actually have to drive very far before the landscape looks more and more sparsely populated; that’s how you know you are going the right way. when you start wondering…
as legendary as the tassie mountain biking is, we also wanted to see what tje north east of tasmania is like. kris & nat had travelled through there earlier, but i had only ever been to the south, around hobart. rather unromantically perhaps, i had always thought of tasmania a cold & wet. it is…
not long ago derby was almost dead, at least as dead as a town can be. in 1874 tin was discovered in the hills around town and consequently mined until 1929, when after strong rainfalls a dam burst and flooded the mine. 14 people died and the mine never reopened. before the accident 3000 people…
there are so many things to like about mountain biking. to begin with it’s an outdoor sport, which is great if you, like us, live in a part of world that generally has pleasant weather and trails set in an unspoilt natural environment. it’s also nice to work those lungs and muscles and why would…
it was that time again: checking the bearings in the linkage of my beloved nomad. it was making strange noises and it is a well known fact that a quiet bike is a fast bike. we like fast. taking out the links is a quick and simple task. i then tested the bearings to see…
rain is a good thing, at least here in australia, and especially these days. large parts of the country have not seen decent rain in years and some places we passed on our trip are actually running out of water (*). but as essential and actually pleasant rain is it can get in the way…
we are very lucky here on the northern beaches: in the hills just behind the beach the trail fairies have been busy using the amazing local features to build some of the best trails you could wish for. we have fast straights, slippery flat turns, steep rollers, natural jumps. and all of that is set…
i never really liked that stem on nat’s dirt jumper. nothing against the thomson stem, it’s very light and extremely well made, but with modern bike geometries long stems are no longer required. we just happened to have this one around and it was lighter than the original giant unit and not much longer. it’s…
i liked my bike carrier. it was super light (made of aluminium of course), easy to attach, easy to load and unload, did not damage the frame and it did fit the karavan, too. in one word: perfect. until a nice lady hit her brakes a tad too late and bumped into the back of…