MT LENNARD MOUNTAIN BIKE
TRAIL SYSTEM
by Dave Roberts
The push bike is the most efficient
form of land transport known to humanity. It takes
roughly a third of the energy to ride a bike one
kilometre as it takes to walk the same distance.
If you want to drive you’re expending around
18 times the energy. Even better, the energy that
you’re spending when you ride is energy that
you really wanted to spend, it makes you healthier,
while that energy from driving just cost you and
the earth in a way that you didn’t want to
pay.
| So that’s the good news.
Last time I looked, the best design for getting
up a hill in rough terrain had four legs and
a beard. So it would seem that the wisest
among us would ride bikes to work and let
goats do the mountain climbing. Well that
may be, but mountain biking is such fun.
Right up the hill behind Dardanup, you
can find the Mt Lennard Mountain Bike Trail
System. It’s pretty low tech in the
scheme of things. The bush has a fantastic
calming effect on lots of us, and a chance
to get out amongst it is the primary attraction.
To facilitate this, there are a lot of trails
marked out through the bush with
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| the little sign of a push bike
nailed to a tree or set onto a post. |
The bush has for a long time been
one of the great exports for West Australia. Way
back to the Swan River Colony, we were selling Swan
River Mahogany, and there are a lot of cities in
Europe with significant amounts of our precious
hardwood doing things including paving the streets
and holding up the railways. To get the timber out
there was an extensive network of tracks through
the forests. Many of them have been utilised for
the trail system. They might have been narrowed,
and when a log has fallen across a track, or water
has washed something out, this just makes it tougher
and more fun, and anyway isn’t climbing over
a log one of the things a bike does best?
At the centre of the trail system
some excitable lads or lasses have built special
stages where you can experience new and better ways
of falling off. If rough hillsides are for mountain
goats, I’m not sure the best thing to use on
see saws, but it can’t be bikes, can it? Probably
the most outstanding was a ramp that was constructed
at the edge of what could once have been a narrow
saw pit. It’s part of a downhill and I was
doing the track with fairly liberal doses of back
brakes already when we found it. The brave (or foolhardy)
could rocket up the ramp and then drop into the
pit. The combined drop looks like about two and
a half metres to me, and the pit is narrow. If you
bounced at the bottom you’d almost certainly
bounce off one or both of the walls. Even the teenager
didn’t do that one.
The exciting stuff is all well and
good but for me just getting a distance into the
bush without making noises and smells brings out
a sense of wonder. There are some fairly steep and
strenuous sections, but there are some beautiful
opportunities to take some gentle, quiet, and soothing
moments. The smells, sounds, coolness of the forest
has an effect. While a hike in the bush has been
a favourite opportunity for years, this is a way
of getting out further into it with the same energy.
A ride in the bush gives you that exquisite isolated
feeling much sooner than a walk.
To get to Mt Lennard, start at Dardanup
and head east up Ferguson Rd. Turn left on Pile
Rd and proceed several kilometres up until you see
the sign on your left. Easy wasn’t it. When
you’re finished you can come back to Dardanup,
or continue north east along Pile Rd and you’ll
reach Collie. You might need to deal with a little
gravel but the road is generally well made and sealing
will be completed soon.
The trail system is great to explore
by yourself, but it’s worth having someone
guide you to get the best from it. Check out the
WA Mountain Bike Club and see when there’s
next an introduction ride. Fair dinkum, this is
the sort of thing that you could really get to like.
May 2004
