28 May 2026 – 61 kms – Moama to Mathoura – Gulpa Island
Yorta Yorta/Bangerang Country
The heavy dew coats every surface in big rounded drops. The fog descends, leaving the barren deciduous tree branches looking like fuzzy, black and reaching claws behind a transluscent sheet of cloud. There is a light wind already that whooshes wisps of fog upward and pushes strands of cloud together into greater masses.
By the time we’ve packed up everything and got everything strapped to the dripping bike, the fog has lifted enough for it to feel safe to ride. We work our way down a bike path that goes from path, to dead-end dirt road, to a hump, to a bit of sand and back to gravel path. We ride up out of the flood plain, take command at a roundabout (ride in the centre of the lane – it’s legal to take the lane so you don’t get smooshed by someone exiting when you still plan to go right) and then zig zag over to the road that parallels the railway.
And then we’re out of town on a road that is all cut up from vehicles driving on it when it was wet. It’s very puddly everywhere – nobody needs anymore rain. They’ve had twice their average May rainfall here. Thankfully, for the farmers not wanting to get machinery bogged in fields and cyclists still waiting for the first non-rainy day of a tour, it will be sunny all day today. Windy. And cold with that bitey southerly. But sunny.
We drift in and out of ruts and use the whole road to find the best line. We’re obviously riding up a stock route as the road reserve is wide and there are large remnant trees that arch over the road like a continuous gateway of vegetation in places.
Along this section of road, over there in the road reserve, along the track next to the rail line, two horses pulling a spring-loaded buggy with two old guys bouncing along inside go flying by at a pace much faster than a trot. What fun that appears!
Eventually we lose the big trees and find ourselves in open paddocks. The flies are surprisingly bad, even though it’s just about 12 degrees (normally flies don’t really come out until its 14 or 15C). However, after we cross the Cobb Highway, make a turn over the rail junction and start heading north, we get that strengthening wind behind us and sail our way on toward Mathoura. The flies come along but are only bothersome when I stop. Otherwise they are content to hitch a ride on my shirt, helmet and panniers.
There’s a bit of traffic on this road every now and again – all locals. Everyone but one guy in a fancy red ute gives me plenty of room. When no traffic is in sight, I use the whole road to find the best line. There are muddy, chopped up bits, hard-packed and fast-riding dried mud bits and some gravelly bits with large and chunky rock hunks. Our average speed is over 20kph – which is fast for being in the first week of a tour and on those 2.8 inch knobbies with a full load.
The main gravel road hangs a hard right a few kms from Mathoura and joins the highway. I keep going straight on the railway access track that some farmer also uses to access his paddocks. I plunk in and out of large tractor tyre ruts and follow the squiggly two-track on toward town.
Just before we reach Mathoura, I can see a deep gully off to the left. There is a big dent in the fields with trees that grow up out of it. How cool is that! That is the orginal course of the Murray River when it flowed west through Mathoura before the earthquakes uplifted this block of land and blocked the river’s flow. The nerdy bits of me are thrilled.
As we roll into Mathoura, there is a big dip in the road occupied by grasses and scattered trees. It’s an obvious indentation – that, too, is the old river course.
I ride up to the council offices/library/info centre. I’m looking for maps and info on the Cadell Fault. I have the academic articles and some online info, but I’m always looking for more info. They have a one-page hand-out, but the woman doesn’t know of any specific sites that I should visit. Her suggested places to camp are just the established campgrounds that allow dogs. Um, no thanks.
From there, I ride around town. It’s not a big place. The main street is a couple blocks off the Cobb Highway and a block away from the railway tracks. There are residential areas on the other side of the tracks, also.
Mathoura was a logging town – the town got its start when logging commenced in the 1870s. Much of the main street seems early 1900s. Most of the houses look to be 1950s to 1970s cottages in various stages of disrepair. Logging ended in 2010 when the area finally became a national park. However, some bits were so flogged they didn’t meet the criteria for a national park and are considered a regional park instead. The NSW side is much more flogged than the Victorian side.
The amount of butchered red gums taken from the forest here was astounding. It supported seven timber mills at one time. In the late 1800s, the mills produced 4,000 to 6,000 super feet (i.e. board feet – 1 foot long, 1 foot wide, 1 inch thick) of timber daily.
Through the 1950s to 1990s, 90,000 cubic metres of sawn timber and over 250,000 railway sleepers were produced each year. At some point, when they started finding it harder to source saw logs, they put in restrictions so that ‘only’ 12.5 million super feet of timber could be taken over a 10-year period. This only applied to certain plots, however. It would be interesting to compare definitions of ‘sustainable’.
Consequently, with only one mill on a private inholding in the forest operating now, the town is pretty dead these days. Work is available in Echuca-Moama or Deniliquin, though, which are both about 40 kms away. There was a $100 million (2010 dollars) transition package, too, so this town at least had some options to adapt.
We head out of town on the road to Picnic Point (where there are several caravan parks on “The Narrows” section of river). I get very excited to see the hump in the road and then the drop down to Gulpa Creek. In doing this, we drop off the uplifted block of earth and onto the down-dropped block. Be still my nerdy heart! We ride along the creek and ride with neck craned to look over at the steep escarpment. So cool! That’s at least six earthquakes worth of work over there.
I ride out to the Reed Beds Bird Hide – not to see birds, as I’m definitely not a bird person, it is mid-day and there is no water to attract any. I want to see the big Moira Lake from this side and put all the scale and geography of the area in my head.
There is a bike path alongside the road all the way out to the site, but it’s full of sticks and rocks and other debris, and other parts of it merge with the road shoulder. It is just easier to ride the road. There is little traffic.
The bird hide has a parking area, toilet and picnic area with bbqs. I take advantage of the toilet – BYO toilet paper as they appear to service the toilet about once a month based on the ‘last cleaned sign’. There is then a boardwalk that takes you out to the bird hide beside the lake. It is well done and the bird hide itself is quite long.
Along the boardwalk, there are swivel boards that show a picture of a bird on one side and information about that bird on the other side. If you spin the board, a recording of that bird call is played. Almost all of them work. I go along and spin them all – confident that I won’t remember which calls go with which birds when I next hear that sound. But in that quiet forest, I fill the wind with the sound from all of those boards. It sounds like a lively forest with multiple birds!
I then ride back to the fault scarp and wander around through the trees taking all of it in. This area has the greatest displacement (i.e. tallest cliffs) on the 68-km-long fault which is, ironically, right where the river used to go. I take a couple more pics and some video. I try to get my feeble little brain around the enormity of events and its consequences that are still felt today.
Then we ride out to a dispersed campsite (with that stupid $6.00 ‘admin’ fee) in the regional park so we can get the tent set up and dried out, and the sleeping bag ‘floofed’ (this is my technical term for regaining the loft in a down bag – it combines the word ‘poofed’ with ‘fluffed’).
This will become the defining routine of the trip. Pack up a tent saturated with dew and condensation and a damp sleeping bag in the cold and dark. Ride hard all day to get the kms in so we can be somewhere by 3pm to set up the tent so it has a couple hours to dry out in the cool air and low intensity sun before dark (5-5.30pm) before the whole cycle starts again.
After fixing up my gut health in 2022 and then being pretty strict about what I will and won’t eat since then, I really don’t have much trouble at all with asthma or hay fever anymore. But mould, mildew and woodsmoke are still my kryptonite. (I think it was early mould exposure in my first 18 months of life that has made me so sensitive to it throughout life – there is research to support my theory).
This all means I have to be super vigilant about getting things dry and preventing mould or mildew growth. Breathing in mould all night from a mouldy tent or gear would make me feel quite shitty (headaches, nose bleeds and sore throat) and hamper my breathing.
This afternoon, I fall into my normal camping afternoon routine, minus the water filtering (we filled up in town – you wouldn’t want to drink any of the water from the rivers and creeks anywhere we go on this tour, even if run through a Sawyer). I set up the tent, set the guys down by the creek to enjoy the habitat, lay the sleeping bag out over the bike to ‘floof’ and get dinner cooking on the stove. I look at maps for tomorrow’s route and write up my journal. I follow the sun around the campsite to stay warm. I enjoy my rice and lentils.
And then, as the sun dips below the trees and we lose the solar radiation, I crawl into the tent and sleeping bag and cuddle down into the warmth. This has been my kind of day – a decent distance on the bike, riding around in the forest looking at geomorphological sites and camping in a dispersed site on some flat ground next to a creek. I’ve very much enjoyed the 3-day geomorphology tour over the past three days – and today was definitely my perfect kind of day.
When I go to the beach, I am often fascinated by the journey a rock had to take to end up in my hand. (Nothing was cooler than finding a rare petosky stone in Illinois once.) Geology is fascinating, and I think tracing the flow of the Murray gives one a different sense of time — things aren’t as fixed as we humans always expect.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. Geology certainly gives a different perspective on time – and erosion is such a fickle thing. You can have as much change in a 2-day storm as you had in 50 years of drought, etc. They already have a good idea of the Murray’s next change of course based on which of the outlet creeks/flood runners are most quickly eroding back toward the main river course. At some point, the main course of the river is likely to take off to the north again near the town I stayed on my first night and then dump into that current anabranch called the Edward River I talked about in my posts. That’s not in our lifetimes, though! The rivers are so interconnected and flood into each other out on that flat land in western NSW that sometimes it’s hard to know what is an anabranch of what!