Tenterfield Ride

A few mates from work and I have been trying to organise a ride for a while now. With all of us working for an airline it is worse than trying to herd cats, what with our rosters being all over the place! In the end it was only Hazo and myself able to line the two days off up to get out on the big chook chasers.

I had a rough plan that would take us down to Tenterfield for the night. It wasn’t looking too likely though as it had been raining pretty well continuosly for the preceding few weeks. Afternoon thunderstorms mainly in those weeks but the day prior to our ride and the morning of it was still raining solidly with a more set-in system. We decided to abandon our 0630am start and try for a 9am coffee/ride. Luckily, the heavens cleared up somewhat and we decided to head off…well, after trying to pair our comms systems for about twenty minutes! Grrr.

We had a good traffic free run until we got to an area by the name of Coulson. Several cars were stopped, watching the water flowing pretty quickly over the low level bridge and its approaches. Chatting to a bloke in a low riding ute he seemed to think the level (40cm/16in deep) had been pretty constant for the last forty minutes or so. 

Shit.

We watched a few trucks and 4wd utes drive through and it didn’t look too deep, especially on the right side but it was flowing strongly left to right.

We stood around for about 45 minutes trying to determine if the level was dropping or not. It seemed to be staying pretty constant, unfortunately. The alternative to get around this flooding was a one and a half hour backtrack which would get us to the intersection that was 200 metres over that bridge.

Hmmm. What to do?

Hazo decided “fcuk it”, jumped on and powered across. I thought “that’s easy” and followed…..and…..it was! All of the “if it’s flooded, forget it” advertising had dented our confidence in trusting our own judgment. 

Noted.

We topped up with fuel in Boonah just in case we came to any more road closures and needed to backtrack.

From Boonah we headed out Carneys Creek road then onto White Swamp road. The countryside was a lush green from all of the rain and the road presented minimal dust. It was near perfect riding conditions. We are glad we hadn’t pulled the pin on the ride.

We stopped at an outlook on White Swamp road just past Koreelah Creek campground to take in the view. 

The green! 

My god, was it green!

From here we flowed along, avoiding cattle on the unfenced road. The few floodways along here only had a trickle flowing over them and most weren’t slippery which was great. 😅

We turned back east at Old Koreelah to head into Woodenbong. I’ve always wanted to check out the Woodenbong Hotel because it doesn’t look like a pub. It looks like an old government/forestry style building and is actually quite inviting. 

Anyway, we broke the drought with a Tooheys Old. 😉

From there we rode the short but fun road to Urbenville, then out onto Paddy’s Flat road. We needed to stop for a rest break a few kilometres along the road, so checked out these cattle yards.

Paddy’s Flat road was in good condition and we didn’t really stop again until the Lunatic Hotel in Drake. The pub was in full swing with the locals, so a quick cold drink and we backtracked to Long Gully road which led into Rocky River road..

It was getting late so we kept motoring as Rocky River road is a looong, slow ride if you want to do it safely. We eventually stopped for a stretch about 25km out of Tenterfield.

Parking the bikes up at our digs in Tenterfield, we had a quick shower and walked down to the Royal Hotel for dinner and a beer. The Royal has decent food and a GREAT selection of craft beers on tap, mainly from Deepwater Brewing. Here we are enjoying a Brewdog Black Heart to cap off the night.😎

Just across the road is the old Tenterfield Saddler building. We spent a few minutes scanning the shopfront before wandering home for the night. It was so nice and cool up here on the range it made for a pleasant way to finish the night.

We were up early next morning, enjoying the cool, dry air. Did I mention that it’s been hot and very humid in Brisbane for the last six weeks? No? Well, it’s been horrible and at ~2500ft above sea level, Tenterfield is cool and dry.

 

Our digs. 

We headed out for a look at the airport, then took a newly sealed tourist loop road around to the Mt Mackenzie road where we turned right, out Gunyah road to take in the view from the Gunyah Road Lookout.

It is a magnificent view from here that is just a little harder to get to being along the dirt road, so nice and quiet….except for the rumble of the odd DX or 1090 v-twin.

Back into town we refuelled and went in search of some breakfast. We decided to try the little Potting Shed cafe’ on the main street. The coffee was good and the breakfast burrito wasn’t bad. Jon had a chat to the “Scalies” that had stopped in for a coffee. One rode bikes so was keen for a chat.

We tried to come up with a route home over our coffees. I was out of ideas until I recalled that I had a .gpx file in Gaia that traced the Rabbit Proof Fence (RPF) from Stanthorpe to Killarney.

Much faffing around followed as we tried to share the file onto my Garmin Zumo XT. I eventually got it on the gps but there was no way that the bloody thing was going to navigate the route.😡

 Why?

 If it was a cycling gps it would have loaded the file and Bob’s yer uncle, we would be set but noooo, these road based gps units need the .gpx converted/massaged in Garmin Basecamp before loading into the gps…..which you need a desktop computer to do….FFS!

We rode the road to Stanthorpe then faffed around some more trying to load the route. In the end Jon put the route on Gaia on his Quadlock mounted phone and we just followed the track with the little “you are here” arrow. Not ideal but it worked…..

The trail was pleasant, little used twin track through lush green paddocks. Beautiful riding and it would be totally suitable for a mountain bike ride too. One might need dropping at Stanthorpe and picking up at Killarney though. 😉

There was one section where we had to ride through a farm yard that had several dogs tied up…and one big white bastard that was loose and chased us. Not probs on the adv bike with boots but there must be a way to avoid this yard as it is clearly on the RPF track. It wouldn’t be nice on a mtb either. I would prefer to avoid it as I don’t like riding across private property any day.

There were a lot of gates. Seriously, a LOT! Lucky I had a speedy KTM rider that I couldn’t keep up with who had the gates open for me. There is a benefit to being slow!😏

Yeah, did I mention gates?

We followed the RPF along on the NSW side, looking at QLD just a few feet away. We soon came to Maryland National Park and entered through another gate. This led to a fun, fast blast along a twisting forest track. I almost ran over a four foot black snake but he luckily made it to the edge of the trail as I blasted by. We were descending for a while and I was thinking “there must be a creek at the bottom”. How would it be?

Well, it proved to be small and well lined with blue stone. It proved no problem to cross being little more than a drain. More fun ensued until we came to the eastern side of the National Park.

We followed some dirt then a bunch of sealed road into Killarney. The Killarney Hotel was a welcome break as it was proving to be quite a warm day. My RST suit gets hot above 23C, even with all of the vents opened. It is funny but I can tell when the temperature climbs through 23C because of this is when I start to become uncomfortable and look at the outside air temp gauge on the bike, and it is always 23C.

Because of this heat we decided to rehydrate with another cold Tooheys Old and one of the hotels “best steak sandwiches ever” (my rating, not theirs - they are seriously good!).

Leaving Killarney we climbed up over The Head Road to White Swamp Gate road then dropped back onto White Swamp road (in NSW)  and backtracked yesterday’s route into Boonah.

We pinned it home from Boonah as that last hour into town (or away from home) absolutely sux. I hate it with a passion. Traffic, incompetent drivers and more traffic. I think half of Victoria has moved up to South East Queensland and it appears to be the half that have no driving skills whatsoever…..

🙄

Arriving home I was quickly unpacked as were credit card camping and packing lightly. This definitely made the bikes much more fun to ride on the dirt. Not sure how many kilometres we did - under one thousand I’d say but we covered some awesome new ground, got to drink some very tasty beers and checked out a cool little country town. 

I’ll be up there a lot more in the future. 😉

Cheers.