After a couple of busy and excercise-free weeks, I finally got out on my bike again yesterday.

It was originally going to be a normal 5-ish person group ride. Everyone else must have caught my piking disease, and it ended up being just 2 of us.

After much indecision, we eventually piled our bikes in the back of the truck and headed north, to Kinglake. For the geographically challenged, the Great Divide is about 50km north of the centre of Melbourne. Kinglake is at the top of the escarpment. As the name would suggest, there is no lake anywhere nearby.

The locals at the bakery didn't seem too keen to help us find new tracks. They get innundated with 2 wheeled folk every weekend: trail and road motorbikes and pedal schmoadies are plentiful. Nowhere sells maps, and they seem like they'd be just as happy if we all stayed home and left them alone.

We parked the car at the Jehosophat Creek carpark. My plans to fill my water bottles were foiled when nothing came out of any of the taps. Rich had filled his camelback before we left home, so we figured that 2.5 litres between us would suffice.

The first track was 3 km of undulating technical "walkers only" singletrack. Lots of steps, a fair few tree-falls, and several walkers. Lots of unashamed and unprovoked brown-nosing because they were supposed to be there and we weren't. We had to walk a few sections that were just too tricky to bother with.

The track comes out to a T-junction with the Mt Jerusalem Track. This is part of the Everard Circuit, which we followed for the whole loop, and is mainly MTB-and-horse legal riding on fairly smooth firetrail. It is a long, thin circuit, running up and down the escarpment.

We headed north (nominally uphill) for a few hundred metres until the track met the road we drove up on. On the other side of the road, the track turned south, and generally ran downhill for a couple of km. You could probably get a 2wd car through this section (slowly, if it wasn't gated), meaning the descent was pretty quick for MTBs. I think I hit about 50 clicks. Rich's dualie (and his proven lack of regard for his own personal safety) was a bit quicker.

The track comes back out to the road and crosses it again, at a car park with a fire-fighting water tank. The road continues down to Melbourne, and the track climbs a spur to the top of Mt Everard. A long slow climb in low gears. The track would be trecherous to ride down, as it is mostly fast firetrail, except for the occasional dodgy bit. Very crudely graded waterbars and loose rocky corners. One section of track had been recently graded, making it soft, rutted, silty clay instead of the dry sandy soil of the rest of the track.

About 100m short of the top of Mt Everard, a tight walking (illegal) track branches off and winds gently down around the hill. This track continues for about a kilometer until it meets a wider walking track heading more directly down into the valley.

Lots of branches down across the track made for interesting riding. It was hard to get the speed up to hop clear over them, because the track was steep and loose and it was difficult to wash off excess speed. I found it best to lift my front wheel over, and just let the rear do it's own thing. There was not much weight on my rear wheel, so it bounced over pretty smoothly. The only glitch was near the bottom where I accidentally landed my front wheel on top a branch, just as my back wheel went for a little side slip. The log started to slide with my front wheel on it, giving me a half second heart palpitation before I recovered.

In total, we probably lost about 300 metres in 3 km. Sensational track.

It is the sad truth of XC riding that you have to pay for long downhills. A few hundred metres of dirt road had us at the bottom of the Mt Jerusalem Track. And so we started climbing.

After about a km, Rich's camelback was dry. We had about 7 km, and 300 vertical metres to go. 5 km later, we were both knackered. I was starting to get a dehydration headache. My legs were telling me to put my saddle up, and my back was telling me to put it down. We swapped bikes for a bit, hoping that a different riding position would be a good break. It turns out that his dualie with a short stem and risers has almost exactly the same riding position as my hardtail with a steep stem and flat bars. The only real differences are that my bike is light, doesn't bob at all, and has bar ends.

We found a little creek along the singletrack we started on, and drank a couple of litres of it. No idea what was upstream, but that really didn't matter at the time. I feel okay today, so it must have been alright.

In all, the ride was about 20 km, and took just on 2 hours ride time. We lost then gained about 400 metres. No flats, no mechanicals, no serious stacks, no bloody water.

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