7 June 2026 – 74 kms – Lake Hattah to Mildura
Latji Latji, Barkindji, Ngintait, and Nyeri Nyeri Country
In these cold, wet mornings when the tent drips with dew and condensation, it is hard to imagine this area in summer. It is very hot and dry here. It is routinely above 35C and annual rainfall is below 300mm (11 inches). Ouyen reached a record-shattering temperature of 48.9C (120F) on 27 January this year, tying with Hopetoun as the highest temperature ever recorded in Victoria’s history. This surpassed its previous record of 48.8C on Black Saturday in 2009.
So this is definitely the time of year to be here, though early spring when plants are flowering would be pretty special, too. We’re going to go have a look at the plants on the nature walk near the park entrance first up.
After riding back out to the track, I pick up the bike and carry it a few feet up the track and put it behind a tree. If you are not ON the road in western VIC and NSW, you carry the bike. You do not roll it anywhere as there are prickles, spikes, thorns and all manner of reproductive and protective plant parts that want to deflate your day through tube punctures.
(All of the bike shops out this way carry thorn resistant tubes – but those are not available in 27.5 x 2.8). And there’s no way I would ever put slime in a tube – that’s fine if you can get home and repair a messy puncture there – but when you’re on the road and sometimes forced to do roadside repairs and water is hard to come by – no thanks, too messy for me!
The nature walk is just a short loop through the mallee ecosystem. Unfortunately, all that harsh sun has completely erased the text from every single interpretive sign. So I’ve got no idea what the plants are, or the special adaptations of those plants. That makes me quite sad; however, I still enjoy all of the different textures (it skews spiky) and shades of grey, green and brown. See a selection of plants in the photos below.
Mallee eucalypts are multi-branched from ground level, usually with a flattened canopy rarely exceeding 6m in height. They grow from a woody underground rootstock called a lignotuber and are generally found on harsh, dry sites. WA has a lot of different species to those found in western VIC and NSW that we ride among for the next few weeks. They tolerate fire very well, regrowing from the lignotuber after fire.
I love the form/growth habit of them. They dispense with anything unnecessary – no low branches, no single trunk reaching for the sky. They grow multi-stemmed to a flat canopy, maximising their grasp of the sun yet shedding it with the angle of the leathery leaves. To me, it’s such an exemplar of adaptation and evolution.
You can read more about this vegetation type here if you lean toward ‘botany nerd’:
https://vicflora.rbg.vic.gov.au/pages/murray-mallee
After we complete the nature walk, we ride the dirt road that is the Old Calder Highway over to a lookout. This road is in great shape – it’s highly corrugated in places, but it is also very wide. On a bike, you have lots of non-corrugated options for a good line.
The lookout is just a short walk up a dune. We can’t see too much to the east because of the blinding sun, but I’m sure it would be nice in the evening and you might be able to catch all the lakes of the Hattah lakes system glimmering in the sun. I just imagine it today, lol. The view off to the west and northwest is just a sea of green tree tops to the horizon. When you look on a map, you can see large reserves of bush to the west – to think that all of these reserves represent only 15% of the original distribution and extent of the mallee country!
We ride down the rest of the Old Calder Highway, enjoying the sculpted dunes and all of the vegetation just bursting forth with green. There’s been so much rain that many of the mallee eucalypts have heaps of bright green new growth clustered at the ends of the branches. The understorey looks vibrant and alive and I do not take this for granted or assume it always looks this way.
We rejoin the highway and the traffic. It’s pretty hilly for the first 20 kms before we emerge into more open, cropped fields. I just pedal it out into another headwind – that is definitely a theme on this trip. It doesn’t matter what direction we want to go – the wind will be from that direction. And there is always wind out here. The tailwind days on this trip will be few and far between.
Traffic is not too bad – a car every 1-3 minutes from one direction or another. The rain days in Swan Hill have screwed up my timing, but it is never bad to ride into a big town on a Sunday. At least you have fewer trucks to negotiate.
However, someone opens the gates shortly before Red Cliffs. There’s not a ton of traffic, and then all of a sudden it gets a bit crazy. Like the roadworks of all roadworks is somewhere and stopping traffic in all directions and then the Stop/Go guys stood aside and told everyone, “Go for it!”.
I stop at the rest area on the edge of Red Cliffs. I desperately need to eat something. I have one tin of salmon and 5 rice cakes left. Lunch.
I am so perplexed about where all that traffic came from. Somebody opened a gate somewhere, I’m sure of it. It’s so constant from both directions, I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to cross the road and go have a look at the big-arse machine they used to annihilate the mallee scrub.
We do make it and take some time to ponder the size and significance of it. There’s a farmers market going on, too, but I don’t wander in.
The traffic remains constant north of Red Cliffs, but the speed limit is reduced to 80kph. I have a pretty wide shoulder. I have devised a route using google maps (not its suggestion, but my own route developed using satellite and streetview) to get into town when this shoulder disappears.
However, when we get to that turn-off, I decide that the main highway will be okay. Everyone’s being pretty good, and the loss of shoulder means a gain of an extra lane. The traffic is not so heavy that cars can’t get around me in the other lane. I will just ride far enough out that they can’t squeeze by in the lane. Hello fine people of Mildura, I can tell you are more than ready to ‘share the road’ this fine Sunday afternoon.
And so we enter Mildura in heavy Sunday afternoon traffic past all the big box stores, strip malls and bike/pedestrian unfriendly streets and shopping entrances. It is hectic, and I’m so glad it’s a Sunday so large trucks are not part of that mix. I do love reading traffic and riding amongst it all, but it’s not quite so fun on a bike with a touring load since you are not quite so nimble. Instead of a speedboat, you are guiding a lumbering cruise ship!
So I just put on my ‘race face’, watch the traffic in my mirror and all sides of me. I pretend I’m 20-years-old again and immortal. And we get to our motel without any unhappy honks or close calls.
Phew, that was 20 minutes of concentration and relying on good bike handling and traffic reading skills. I’m proud to have never put a foot down, even when we had to stop and wait and balance that big-arse bike at roundabouts. (The 50 -year-old me says I didn’t like that experience very much, but the 20-year-old who still resides within me says, “whoo-hoo, we got a thrill out of that”!).
The entrance into town from this direction, with its four lanes, east-west orientation, big box stores and motels, reminds me of entering Ft Collins on Harmony Road (without the good bike infrastructure). It makes me think of my uni friends – I should send them all “hello, was thinking of you” emails tomorrow. They’re all bike people to some extent.
Because it’s a long weekend, we’re a bit stuck here for a couple days before I can get the bike looked over and I can get good information about riding out to Lake Mungo. The road out to Lake Mungo has been listed as “Open with Caution – 4WD only” for weeks now. I need to know what that means in reality. Is there thigh-high water over the road? Is it just muddy? Or are there ruts that would be difficult clearance in a 2WD car but pose no problems for a mountain bike? I ride all of those 4WD tracks in the high country, but what does 4WD entail out here?
I also want the bike shop to check the wheel true and re-center the brake pads (I can do this, but it is hard for me – you have to squeeze the brake really hard while you use your other hand to loosen and tighten the bolts on the brake pads at the disc. I just don’t have the grip strength and wingspan to do this task well). I want to ensure the wheels are in true before I put a whole lot of water weight on them and then ride over a whole lot of bad corrugations on the more remote roads ahead.
So the bike is booked in for Tuesday and I won’t be able to visit the national parks office until then because of the Monday public holiday. I hate to lose sunny days to ‘zero’ days, but I also don’t want to wander off into remote areas without being fully prepared.
And so, we’ve got 2 days in Mildura ahead of us, and then a ‘positioning’ day ahead on Wednesday. It’s a hurry up, ride some big kays, then wait (and wait some more) sort of trip.