One of the best bike days I have been lucky enough to score this year, and there have been a few, was away down south near Queenstown.
The Coronet Loop is a fifty kilometre trail best accessed from Arrowtown.
As I beetled through town to the start of the route I spotted a couple of buses with trailers full of bikes, and a heap of people milling around them. Thought approximately nothing of it.
A decent climb through beautiful beech forest pops a rider out on to the western face of Coronet Peak, to follow an old water race made by miners in the century before last. Drop dead views unfold, as well as tight little sections of trail you don’t want to fall off (see above re dropping dead).
After a long traverse there is a short climb to the start of the descent into Skippers Canyon. We had driven into Skippers a few days earlier, and for my money the steep and loose Pack Track mountain bike trail felt a fair bit safer than the road.
The best bit of the Loop commences after that downhill. Huge outlooks, big landforms, on a very nicely made trail that rolls along without any real technical challenges to take your mind off the sheer goodness of being out there.
I hadn’t seen a soul since diving into Skippers, and then I spotted a rider up ahead. When I caught up to her I realised she was part of a procession - another rider a little way in front, then another, and more in the distance.
From the tentative way they were riding downhill, and the general look of them tackling anything else, I guessed they were all relative beginners. We swapped greetings as I passed them and they all looked to be having fun, so I made another guess: they hadn’t ridden all the way from Arrowtown. I figured they must have shuttled to the top of Skippers. By the time I had passed a dozen school kids with their adult chaperone we were into another long climb.
I stopped at a stupidly spectacular rocky outcrop, and ventured out on to it so I could confirm my general fear of being on small high things. I sat there for a long time considering my good fortune. I took too many photos of the same thing, as usual, then realised that right in the middle of one was the leading posse of the people I had seen earlier. I could barely see them with my naked eye, they were almost lost in the landscape.
They were moving very slowly.
They are hard to see, but there they are, in the middle of this image, looking much like little ants.
A long piece of trail later I got to the Macetown Road, a four-wheel-drive track that follows the Arrow River back to Arrowtown. The road fords the river many times, but each crossing has a diversion for walkers and bike riders. I missed the entrance to the last one, and as my feet were already sort of wet from numerous earlier creek crossings I figured I would wade it. Not my best decision, it was thigh deep for a long way and really cold. Managed to keep my bike out of the river for the most part.
I got to Arrowtown in time for a look around town and coffee, and we hung around for several hours before heading back to our caravan. I was thinking about the group of beginners and wondering where they were. I saw a couple of e-bikers who had been behind me on the trail arrive looking happy to be at the finish, but no sign of the gang I had seen on the trail.
There were no news reports of missing mountain bikers, so they must have made it to town eventually. Under their own steam, too: there was no way a bus and trailer was going up the Macetown Road to collect them.
That right there illustrates for me the excellence of bicycles. These people had a big adventure, on a route that was way too far to walk in a day. They had ventured into some country with a really isolated feel to it, but with a fairly low level of risk.