<\/a><\/p>\nAt one stage we’d been sitting there a while, i don\u2019t really know how long, time was irrelevant. The whole experience, i felt kind of removed from, anyhow i noticed Simon gazing at the bank of snow in front of us.<\/p>\n
“What are you looking at” i said.<\/p>\n
“ab-sol-ute-ly-no-thing” Simon forced from his mouth.<\/p>\n
We were drained, shot, exhausted, we knew we would get out of this situation but would it be before dark, before the morning, we just wanted out.<\/p>\n
Five back breaking hours and only five\u00a0kilometers later we reached the downhill but it was still too snowy to ride, I had a crack at riding but attempts were futile. A few hundred meters later the track rounded a bend and the snow subsided, the trail spread out before us, we were ecstatic.<\/p>\n
As we pedaled off a few problems emerged, ice had formed in the cleats of our pedals. The wheels on our trailers were full disc’s of ice, maybe fully aero, but hardly needed. This combined with the fact we could feel nothing below our ankles made riding down a fire trail with fully loaded BoB trailers at up to 40 km\/h pretty interesting, but hell what did we care we were making progress!<\/p>\n
A few kilometers down the hill we entered a logging operation. It seems this whole area was destroyed by the 2003 fires and with nothing left they\u00a0had taken\u00a0the option of bull dozing everything.\u00a0The track on the map had been over run by a bulldozer and scattered trees were all over the\u00a0place. For us this was the last straw. We swore and cursed as we\u00a0pulled our bikes over fallen tree trunks. Our echoes of unrepeatable curses could be heard down the valley.<\/p>\n
Eventually after some pretty hairy riding, my trailer jack knifed throwing me off a few times, we arrived at the source of the logging operation. A rather big angry, yet some what confused logging man came walking quickly towards me. I sensed his concern and frustrations so\u00a0I greeted him with “Help, get me the hell out of here!”<\/p>\n
He seemed somewhat confused as to how we had got there. When we told him a brief explanation of how we happened upon the operation. He told us they had not bothered to close the operation off with signs from the top end coz no one would think to come down that way at this time of the year. Well think again buddy, if there are challenges to be had people will do them!<\/p>\n
As I stood there staring at this man I thought. “Only wish I knew what I do now at the top of the hill”<\/p>\n
I think we both felt and looked pretty stupid to the logging guys so as\u00a0soon as directions were given we were out of there off down the hill.<\/p>\n
The next twenty minutes rolling into Mt Beauty\u00a0were\u00a0pure bliss. We were going so fast our clothes were drying out and our toes could be felt again, yeah and we were reminded as to why we do this.<\/p>\n
We sat out the front of the supermarket for almost an hour returning in for more munchies every few minutes. When we had stuffed or faces enough to realize who we were and what we were doing we grabbed a six pack of South Australia’s finest (which for some reason was cheaper than in Adelaide) and made for the caravan park. We lashed out and hired a Yurt (Mongolian home) kind of fitting i thought after our days epic. We hung our stinky wet clothes all over the place ordered pizza and the fatty goodness of deep fried fish, drank beer talked shit and reflected on what was one of those epic days, hell at the time but a laugh to look back upon.<\/p>\n
Over the next few days we crossed about six mountain passes and took an easier route to Melbourne, short of going straight down the Hume Highway. We met a scary but friendly drunk in Alexandra, drank far too much Guinness to comfortably ride much further one night and laughed a lot about the events that unfolded on the first day!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I spend a lot of time outdoors pursuing adventures for work, education and experience or sometimes just the sheer thrill of it.\u00a0Any opportunity to explore the world around us I jump upon. A few rules of travel I have created for myself are it must be physically challenging, mentally rewarding and cheap; yeah I am … Continue reading Snowy times in the Victorian high country<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":262,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyclingwild.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyclingwild.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyclingwild.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyclingwild.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyclingwild.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/cyclingwild.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":877,"href":"https:\/\/cyclingwild.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions\/877"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyclingwild.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyclingwild.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyclingwild.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyclingwild.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}