Movin’ right along – Day 7 – The first downhill

27 September 2026 – Ault Beeac Track to Marysville – 47 kms

Taungurung Country

I hear the watch alarm. I ignore the watch alarm. I sleep some more.

Eventually, I rise. The rain has cleared and there is a light southwesterly tickling the tree leaves high above.

Water drops stand on leaves, the tent, the bike and other horizontal surfaces. It feels fresh and clean, and I manage to pack the tent up without getting it muddy.

Still, pack-up is slow this morning and I don’t pedal away until after 7am.

It must be a sleep hangover from sleeping so much yesterday and then sleeping straight through last night.

We continue our climb to the top of the range on a gravel road in good condition.

We pass many more clear cuts, many from the past five years. Since all of this burnt in 2009, you’d think you’d want to leave the trees that didn’t die in the fire to remain to help re-establish habitat and ecosystems. But obviously, nobody cares about that. You’d be forgiven for thinking Australia can’t grow big trees since it’s hard to find anything over 30-years-old in so many places.

The clear cuts do give use good views to the east and to the ranges we’ll be riding in tomorrow.

The wind gains strength and shifts to south-southeasterly. The sky remains bright and clear – all of the pollen and dust temporarily driven to the ground with the rain yesterday.

There are no grades much over 7 percent, so I just climb and spin and don’t strain the chain. My legs have had no real problems with our first climb over a range on the trip. This bodes well for the rest of the ride.

We finally get to the road that will zip us down the eastern side of the ridge. It’s in pretty good condition and is steep enough in places that I’m braking in pulses. There are some small trees that have fallen over the track here and there, so I can’t get up too much speed since I have to slow right down and bump the bike over those where they are lowest and closest to the road.

But yee-ha! It is a long downhill and there’s no traffic. Woo-hoo – I love the downhills as a reward for all of the climbing. Down, down, down. It’s a fun one and never scary with no ‘oh shit!’ moments.

The Ride with GPS suggestion has a whole bunch of turns down near the bottom where we hit the pine plantation. My paper map shows a heap of tracks going lots of different directions, too. I figure I’ll have a better look at the map when I get up to that, but once we get there, I’m cruising along so nicely with so little effort, I don’t stop. I just keep turning downhill at each intersection and hoping for the best.

This time, it all works out and I pop out on the edge of Buxton near the mountain bike park. I ride past a bunch of new homes on 1-2 acre blocks. This town was nearly wiped out in the 2009 fires, and none of these new places look particularly fire resistant. Hmmm…. short memory?

Buxton has a nice big park along the main highway. It’s the end of the long weekend and plenty of people are stopping to pee and dump their camping rubbish in the small red bins. That’s a no-no, but I guess most people interpret ‘carry in-carry out’ as ‘carry out to a nearby bin’ instead of ‘take home with you’.

I get all my gear set out to dry in the gorgeous sun. It’s cool enough that the shade is too cool. I get out the solar panel and charge my phone and camera battery. In mid-day sun, at this time of year, it charges the phone as fast as it would charge plugged into a wall. Good stuff.

I’m sitting in the middle of a big field, but a magpie comes by and swoops on occasion. Randomly. Just to let me know he’s there, I guess.

I work out what I think we’ll do for the next couple days and the route I want to take into the forest. I think we’ll ride into Marysville, restock crackers and peanut butter, and then head into the forest tomorrow. We’ll have to ride directly into the wind all the way the way to Marysville today with long weekend traffic, but I like the grades on tomorrow’s proposed route better than what I orginally mapped out.

Okay, we’ve got a plan.

I soak up that nice sunshine a bit longer while I talk to my parents and then have a nice conversation with a middle-aged bloke with dredlocks folded up underneath a baseball cap. He’s there with his 12-year-old son and younger daughter and they’ve been shooting some hoops and playing tennis (very badly).

The dad asks the usual questions and some questions about the ‘serious-looking’ bike. Before the kids came along, he and his wife had done a lot of rides in the area. He tells me about the 130-kilometre ride he did from Alexandra to Melbourne that left him beyond buggered. There was also one ride from Alexandra to Mansfield that made his wife cry three times. It’s a great conversation and I hope he can get back to the bike after the kiddos are a bit older and/or head off on their own.

Buxton is just a few closed businesses, a petrol station, pub and primary school strung out along the highway. We ride up to the Marysville Road, glad we are not trying to ride this main highway with all of the long weekend traffic heading back to Melbourne.

I crawl along into the wind through the picturesque valley. The mountains rise above the river on both sides with the valley floor a mix of tall trees and open paddocks. There is a moderate amount of traffic, but 100 percent of the drivers are good and pass me safely and wait patiently for a few seconds if it is not safe to pass. Everyone must be in a relaxed, good, holiday weekend mood!

I rolled into Buxton at the 27 km mark. But as I ride up the valley toward Marysville, the odometer doesn’t budge. I stay stuck on 27 even when I know I’ve ridden at least three kilometres. The metres seem to randomly accumulate, and the speedo is working fine letting me know how slowly I’m riding into the wind up the valley.

Weird. I stop and take the computer off the mount (I still use an old, wired, basic bike computer). I blow on the contacts and ensure the magnet on the spoke aligns with the sensor on the fork.

But as I ride along, the metres just seem to randomly click over, but we stay stuck on 27 kms. Crap, I really depend on the odometer when I do these high country rides to help me know when I should be looking for the next track since they aren’t always signed. I use the odometer to help me know where I am on the paper map. I’ll take a closer look once we get to town.

Marysville is very, very busy. It’s quite nuts, but it’s a good kind of nuts. People populate the outdoor tables scattered along the footpath at the pub. The playground has heaps of shrieking children and the tables within the picnic shelter are packed with picnic accessories. A tablecloth hangs at a jaunty angle from the corner of one, held down by an esky and platters of food.

I roll down to the supermarket and negotiate the many kids and teens clogging the drinks and snack aisle. It’s a small supermarket but it has the basics, so I come out with my peanut butter and crackers, some chicken and a gluten free, dairy free dip that I’m going to dunk the chicken in.

The park next to the supermarket is a large, grassy expanse where a group of motorcyclists sit near the edge smoking and talking. A group of Asian guys are spread way apart and kicking a soccer ball. On the other edge of the grassy expanse, some kids are playing badminton without a net in front of a large family group sitting on blankets spread on the grass. Several older ladies in long dresses and hijabs attend to the smaller kids who keep running back and forth from a small creek. It’s a festive and fun atmosphere.

Two couples, likely in their mid-late 30s, with four kids jumping and running alongside them walk not too far behind where I’m sitting and stuffing my face.

One of the little girls asks her dad, “But how does she sleep”?

The dad laughs as he looks over at me and says, “Very well, probably. She’s probably got a tent packed on there somewhere.”

Marysville was wiped out in the 2009 fires. More than 95 percent of the houses and businesses were lost. 34 people lost their lives and all but 14 of the 400 buildings (commercial and residential) were destroyed. When I came through in 2017, there were still vacant business blocks on the main street and steps, stairways and driveways that led to nothing. It still felt eerie and quiet. The magnitude of the loss was still evident.

When I ride through the residential area on my way to find somewhere to camp today, there are still many vacant blocks and driveways leading nowhere. At one place, the shell of the old house and garage remain, and a new home has been built behind it higher on the block. The old house still has some of the temporary fencing standing beside it, as if it’s still late Feb 2009. On other streets, house after house is quite new, testament to entire streets being wiped out and then rebuilt.

However, the town has recovered in economic ways, and the population is now the same as it was before the fires. 40 percent of the town’s residents have moved here after the fires. Home prices have risen 441% since 2019. The scenic, little town nestled between the ranges is only an hour or 1.5 hours out of Melbourne.

It makes me wonder what sort of division there might be between those that went through that tremendous trauma and those that came after. I don’t think I could live in a place like this that had lost so many residents so recently. I know that there are people that still haven’t been able to afford to rebuild and that live in caravans in nearby towns. I’m not a particularly superstitious person, but there are some places that make me feel uneasy, and this is one. Obviously, other people don’t feel that. Nevertheless, it is good to see all the people out enjoying the sun and the long weekend today.

I grunt my way up the super steep Old Melbourne Road and into the forest. I don’t have to go far to find the perfect spot for the night in one of the super-wide fire breaks above town. I settle down, enjoy the view and get cozied up into my sleeping bag early as it’s meant to get down to 2C tonight.

And I finally figure out the bike computer. Somehow it has gottten onto the total distance instead of the trip odometer that I reset each day. So it was showing me that I had ridden 2741 kms in total, not 27.41 kms today. The fact that I rolled into town on km 27 for the day and the total distance was in the 2700s was a coincidence. Those metres that I thought were randomly ticking over were kilometres 🙂 Doh!! But I’m relieved that it is working correctly before I head deeper into the ranges, since I really do use that a lot to help in navigation each day.