After two recent unsuccessful recent attempts, I finally managed to ride from my place to Scrub Road / South Boundary Road via Camp Mountain.
On my third trip along this route in a month, it was starting to feel a bit repetitious, but I really wanted to prove to myself that I could do it.
It’s challenging because there are a few tough climbs involved (Camp Mountain, Scrub Road, South Boundary Road northward), plus a couple of short nasty climbs in Bunyaville and Ironbark. All up it involveds about 1,600m of climbing, so I wanted to nail all of them in one go just for the sake of it.
DERM has recently graded the trail to the summit of Camp Mountain, but it didn’t seem to help me. I still took just over 13 minutes to climb it, and was exhausted and gasping for breath when I reached the top. This Goanna (or Lace Monitor) looked at me suspiciously, sniffing the air as I tried to catch my breath, so I grabbed a quick picture of him while I had the chance.
Then I had a quick ride up the bitumen along the hill tops to the trail head for Scrub Road.
The last time I rode this track it was so muddy my wheels clogged up and stopped turning. Thankfully this time the sun had dried up the mud, which meant a nice smooth ride for a couple of kilometres to the causeway at the bottom.
But, as every rider and hiker in D’Aguilar National Park knows, what goes down, must go up! So I put the bike into “granny” gear and spun furiously for half an hour to get out of the valley and back up onto the ridgeline at South Boundary Road.
I really appreciate the shelters and water tanks that DERM has built in the national park. Once I reached the shelter at the corner of Scrub Road and South Boundary Road, I took a bit of a break and cooled off under the water tap. It felt wonderful!
Since I had a bit of a whinge about DERM in a previous post I wanted to put on the record the fact that I do appreciate the work they do maintaining our parks. I love having such a large and diverse park so close to home, and despite occasional muddy fire trails, the park is very well maintained.
Just on a side note, did you know that Mount Coot-tha forms part of the D’Aguilar National Park system. It’s only 5.5km from the Brisbane CBD. I can’t think of any other capital city in the world that has such a large national park so close to the city centre.
All up 81km, 1,600m of ascent, and just under 5,000 kcal burned. This one is 9 out of 10 on the tough-o-meter.
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