Riverhead trail digging

Friday I registered for the 35km leg of the N-Duro Marathon race. I will do it on the SS but I believe I am going to be broken at the end. There are 2 good climbs, neither of which I have ever completed on the bike. There is also some nice single track with the inclusion of Hot X buns this year as well as Be rude not to which is still one of my favourite Rotorua trails, even though I am always half broken when I get there.

The MTB world champs are in Rotorua the week after the race, with the race being the first event in a week of MTB stuff happening in town. I really wish I had got my shit together and organised to go down for a few days. I know so many people taking the week off and volunteering during the week day events for free entry in to the big weekend.

I had a good morning at the gym, got a decent ride and some weights in, it is my second to last free day and I don’t think I will join.

After the gym I went straight to Riverhead forest for a trail scoping exercise with James to try and find an old trail to be cleared as part of designing a course for the last round of the Auckland champs in December. Riverhead is a commercial pine forest that has been half felled. The area we are looking at was felled about 2 years ago and 10 ft pines are starting to grow. Unfortunately the gorse has been rampant and it is incredibly thick and well over 6 feet tall in places.

Riverhead has long been an Auckland mountain biking institution though there have been access issues over the past few years with the previous forestry company. The new owners have yet to decide on what access they will allow the various interested parties and where and how they will allocate access, so we are all being cautious and following the basic trail building rules.


He was looking for a ‘trail’ that he had seen from overhead photos, the aim was to scope the trail and see where it ends, clear the worst of the gorse so that a trail cutting crew can go through on Sunday with scrub cutters to start cleaning the mess.

The weather was not the best for scoping at Riverhead, or in fact for doing anything at Riverhead. It rained on the way up to the forest but luckily it did not rain while we there. We walked up one track clearing some of the worse old gorse until we hit the top and then climbed the road to the top of Pattersons. There was an old fire trail off to the right that had been widened into a full forestry road and at the top of that an old bit of single track headed off down the ridge. We cleared the entry into the trail with the loppers and opened up the first 20 ft or so before heading down the trail clearing the worst of the old hard gorse as we went, leaving enough space to walk down without getting too scratched. The track was fairly greasy and in parts was over 6 inches deep in muddy water, there will be quite a bit of drainage work needed as well to prevent large ruts forming before the race. We realised time was moving away from us so really started to only clear the really thick stuff that would prevent a larger gang from seeing the track. About half way down the gorse cleared a bit and we had a good run to the end of the trail, before walking back to the car.

There is going to be a lot of work needed to complete the trail before any racing can be done it, gorse and cutty grass needs to be completely pushed back, otherwise it will grow over the trail again, the major ruts need to be taken out and some decent drainage put in. It will be a fun trail when it is finished though and is another option in quite big loop.