MTB trip to Lyserfield

After some weeks of innactivity with the RMIT Outdoors Club, I got in contact again for an awesome mountain biking trip. Although, there are some bikes available to be borrowed in the club I used mine . The destiny was Lysterfield Park, one of the national parks in Victoria in the part of the state.

I got up at 7am and had a light breakfast, then put all thing I might need in my backpack and took the bike downstairs. I headed to the station and at 7.50 I was in the city. The meeting point was the “gear room” in RMIT. I was a bit shocked when I got there and realised I was the first. I waited until 8.05 when it stated to drizzle and a weird idea came to my mind “did I miss any email from the club” haha. Fortunately I was wrong and Mauricio turne up few minutes later then Nick, Jason, Rachel, Bob and Mari. Guys with no bikes took one from the gear room and the other put them on Grant’s ute. There were three vehicles so I went with Jason and Mari in Jason’s car.

Apparently we went faster than the other guys cos we got to the bakery first (the chosen place to meet which is few km from the actual park). After a while the other cars appeared as well so we went into the bakery and had an extra breakfast, got some water and lunch for after the trip. That stop was actually quick but necessary. That was the first time I was in that area so I didn’t know much about the facilities available, Jason suggested to get all we may need from the bakery so that’s what we did.

After 10 min. drive after the stop in the bakery we finally reached the car park where we leave the cars and the adventure starts. Everyone took his/her bike and tuned them. As I just picked mine from the technician the day before there wasn’t need to do any extra fix. We meet in an arid area next to the car park and discussed about the route and the plan for the day. We did first the called “loop”. We looked each other expecting someone to lead the group and after few seconds noone said anything so Grand said… come on! let’s rock this!… fair enough, everyone jumped to the bikes and the most exciting trip of this month began.

We went from the car park down to the first hill and into the forest. That moment was so exciting, we got speed quickly and then I noticed I was turning from the left to the right side so quickly trying to avoid the trees one after another. The single track is well defined for MTB and I said “this is so cool and not that hard”, well I should have not said that because after some minutes of amazing and narrow single track the up hill started. Damn it! let’s pedal! come on!, and when I looked up there was a quite steep. This is one of these moments when you think “Will I be able to make it?” if you do not have a good fitness (which is my case) and you’re in this kind of trips you will quickly realised that if you wanna have fun and finish the route you’ll have to push yourself more than what you expted. In my case it was damn good because that was one of the purposes of this going out. The bad thing about this part was the cramp I got after few up and downs in the 4th hill, so I had to stop some minutes. After that I took the bike again and the most incredible part of the trip took place.

I starte to pedal again and noticed the a great downhill was coming with many trees and local bush, we went into it and with the speed again you don’t think in other thing but in keep yourself on the track. Suddenly all the bushes which were surrounded us finished, left that part of the park and went into a sort of flat area but still slanted. As I said you don’t realised much because you are consentrated, in my case I still had some post effects of the cramp in my right leg but everything dissapeared when I raised my eyes and saw all these kangaroos running across the single track, it was the most sensational moment I’ve experienced so far in this country. We were riding down, getting speed and these animals were jumping. Of course when they saw our presence in the are they kept a proper distance from the single track and we just passed without stropping but again, it was so exciting!!.

Once we passed, that zone the loop finished and we were again in the starting point (there were more areas we rode through but its no worth to explain them).

The second round or trip was the longest but the complexity of the tracks were less. I’m still wondering about this, I’m not quite sure if it was the case or my body got used to it and no more physical complaints turned up hehe. Indeed the feeling was different and everyone was more into the route and the role of each one. As you should know, in this kind of trips you cannot stop only because you can otherwise you get behind the group and because of the several routes and sub routes you can end up lost in the forest so that’s why I didn’t take photos and I just could use the camera when we stopped to run some challenges among all the riders. Here some of the callegences we had to face.

It looks easy but believe me!, it’s not!, just start considering that once you are over these trunks your points of refernce and equilibrium change completely beacuse they’re loosely stacked each other. Well in summary it was a very nice trip, a bit quick but with so mush adrenalin. I really want to go back and do the sme track and stop in some places I just couldn’t such as near the lake and the area with the wild kangaroos.

Here a photo with some scenes that day.

Ohh I almost miss it, one of the guys in the trip brought his mobile with gps (Global Position System) embeded which was used to track the routes we took and that night, back in Melbourne, he sent us the kml file (a file with the coordinates) which can be read by Google maps so we end up with a map and the route we followed , one of the views I took is the first pic in this post but a detailed is the following,

enjoy

 

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