It’s been a rainy long weekend. One those that teases you with the on again, off again rain periods. Enough sunshine to make it seem OK to go out but then enough rain to change your mind. By Monday afternoon, I’d had enough teasing and waiting and wondering. I packed tools, food and drink into my saddle bag (the one I converted from a handlebar bag), smashed out a GPS plot on RideWithGPS and headed up to Beerburrum to start a newly minted loop under the Bruce Hwy and over to Wild Horse Mountain*.
Current train outages due to strike action and line upgrades made me decide to drive to Beerburrum. Evidence of the upgrade was obvious as I pulled into town with large trees from newly cleared land strewn at the roadside – a fairly distressing sight but that’s a conversation for another day.
With bike unloaded, I pulled on the car door handles one last time to appease my OCD and rolled down Old North Coast Road – a narrow side road – out of town. Crunching along the dirt trail beside Steve Irwin Way, I weaved in and out of tall tree cover leaving thick tyre imprints in the coffee coloured soil. Minutes later, Tibrogargen appeared in full view to my left as the trail veered closer to the road and turned to a dry crusher dust surface. But the fun stopped abruptly at a temporary fence with a notification that the trail had ended due to the ongoing track works. With a few choice words under my breath, I thought that the ride might have ended but as I prepared to give up a voice greeted me from behind.
It was one of the workers involved with the railway upgrade. He informed me that although the trail was impassable, there is a bus service on offer to get bike riders past the closure and that I would be able to carry on. I was shown to a minibus with a luggage trailer parked by the side of the worksite and was helped to load my bike into the carpet-lined trailer. The minibus dropped me off several hundred metres down Steve Irwin Way past the worksite and I was off again.
A short way further down the trail and I was at Beerwah where I crossed Steve Irwin Way again and disappeared down a side road past farms and fields and finally into the pine forest on the Western side of the Bruce Highway. A few young guys on trail bikes passed and waved and I carried on through the cool of the early winter air until I came to the Bruce Highway underpass.
Once on the Eastern side of the highway, I did a little unplanned exploring as I took my eye off the GPS and wandered off the course I had planned out but the pine forest isn’t that large and the trails within it really only go either East-West or North-South so the danger of getting very lost seemed minimal.
Back on course and moving away from the highway, it became very noticeable how quickly the noise of the highway dissipated the further I headed away from it. I’m not sure if it was the forest itself absorbing the noise or something else entirely but it seemed almost like magic. Suddenly, I was in absolute quiet listening only to my breathing and the sound of my tyres on the varying surfaces – sand, rock, hardpack and the sloshing of mud as I rolled through some large puddles after the recent rain.
I was now at about the half-way point of the ride. A massive red kangaroo bounded across the trail and into the pine forest on the other side. I reckon it would definitely have been taller than me. A little further and the pine forest subsided into a clearing where machines had obviously harvested the plantation pine. The bareness was kind of eerie – a big scar on the land. Pieces of timber still lay around and the exposed ground was dusty and dry.
Before long, I reached the base of Wild Horse Mountain and climbed the 700 or so metres to the top to reveal a long view in every direction – The Sunshine Coast, the hinterland to the West with the Glass House Mountain bathing in the light of the late afternoon, Pumicestone Passage snaking down the inside of Bribie Island to the East and Brisbane far off to the South. Having absorbed everything, I headed back down to finish the final leg of the journey.
Around the base of Wild Horse Mountain on the Western side, I followed a dirt double track that went past more cleared plantation pine and back into the bush. Beside a creek I followed, the land was quite low and the puddles were large and deep. The mud clung to my tyres and flicked up onto my saddle bag, shoes and the underside of my frame. Some of the trails here were quite gnarly to get up and down and I was happy to have my Bombtrack Beyond+ with it’s 2.8 inch tyres. With a little bit of wrangling, the bike floated up, over and down most things without issue.
After emerging out of the bush where the roughest of the trails ended, another long stretch of double track lined with pine trees awaited. I still had some snacks in my saddle bag but started to feel a little depleted having started the journey after only a small lunch. The double track finally emptied out onto Red Road where a bridge over the highway would take me back to Beerburrum via one final short section of road. I stopped at the end of the trail and wolfed down my snacks – a couple of muesli bars and a banana before carrying on.
The sun was low in the sky as I passed the final few farm houses then saw the familiar railway worksite, crossed Steve Irwin Way and rolled back into Beerburrum.
Ride safe and see you out there sometime.
* It’s unlikely that you’ll actually see wild horses at Wild Horse Mountain.