This image is from riding buddy Mike Ferrentino. the run along the back of the ridge I am headed for is next level.
The thing about big days on the bike is I usually have excellent recall of the good bits.
The not-so-good bits, less so.
I have heard it said that people sort of auto-delete the most arduous parts of an experience so that they may be willing to do it again. Apparently that explains how women sign up for repeated childbirths.
On nowhere near the same level, big adventurous bike rides.
I rode the Paparoa Trail last year. It was a great day, especially when reviewed a year later. One of the vague plans for our current lap of the South was to meet some mates from up north and ride some West Coast stuff, Paparoa included.
Unfortunately, the weather for the time-window we had was not good. In fact, it was briefly national news. Serious rain, followed my more rain, with rain. Especially on the ranges of the West Coast of the South Island, where some rain is the default position.
In the clouds, beetling along the top of the world.
We cancelled the plans, stayed on the delightful Kaikoura Coast, and ventured to Christchurch for some great food and a couple of laps of the Chch Adventure Park - if you are there, don’t miss it. The trails are fun and the chairlift ride is worth the price of entry without taking the trails into account.
We also met up with a mate who we had not seen for way too long.
Mike Ferrentino is a bike journalist whose output we read for many years before we finally met in person, and that was 25 years ago. We go back a long way. Over the decades, we have shared quite a few big bike rides. He was in New Zealand for a few weeks and had planned to join the group outings that had been cancelled.
Over souvlakis we consulted the weather maps and worked out that if we hurried over the mountains there was a couple of dry days slotting in between the fronts, and if we didn’t muck around we could get some rides in before he had to depart the country.
We decided to warm up on the Pike 29 Memorial trail, and then do the Paparoa, which I described as a fairly mellow climb to a ridge with big views, then a downhill through forest, and a small bump in the terrain near the end. That is how I remembered it.
I should have re-read my blog from last time.
The Pike 29 trail commemorates the mining disaster, and the route to the trail passes the memorial to the tragedy.
It is a great day ride, a long and fairly tough climb to a huge view, and a corresponding 20 odd minutes of descending that is fantastic.
Mike, at or about the treeline. I described this as the top of the climb. Which was a baldfaced lie.
I assured Mike that the Paparoa climb the next day was not as hard, and we woke in Punakaiki to a bluebird morning, ready to go.
From the start, the trail was nothing like my memory of it. It features loose, chunky rocks, projecting pieces of bedrock, and some steep bits that share that sort of surface. There are long sections that more closely match my memory of the thing.
At the top, where I announced our arrival at the ridge, we were nowhere near the top, or the ridge.
The ridge did indeed include some knife-edge top sections with prodigious drops either side, but there were also continual climbing sections I had completely forgotten about.
Even the glorious downhill through mossy cloud forest scattered with gigantic boulders contained plenty of uphill bits.
The flat section along the river was flat, and followed the river as I had forecast, but it also featured two decent climbs that had slipped my memory.
The little climb at the end was actually a bastard, and one bit made me stop and curse before walking a brief section.
That was four days ago. I am already daydreaming about the good bits, and thinking about when I can fit in another lap.