Grand Ridge Rail Trail - March 2015

This marks my first attempt to write up a one day bike ride (I did a post about the multi day Mawson Trail somewhere on the blog) so I'm on a bit of a learning curve as to what constitutes a good post about bike riding. The first thing I've learnt is that I'll have to carry my small camera as I got sick of stopping, taking my pack off, getting the camera out, holding everything including my bike, and then trying to get a decent photo. I think my small waterproof camera in an outside pocket will probably be the go although the photography will suffer. The second thing I noticed is that I just didn't want to stop to document the experience, especially if I was barrelling down hill. I'm not sure how I'll fix that!

The start of the Grand Ridge Rail Trail at Boolarra.

The plan for the day was to head to the small town of Boolarra in the Strzelecki Rangers in South Gippsland and ride up to Mirboo North for lunch, before gliding back down to Boolarra and heading home. About ten minutes into my two hour journey to the trail head I realised that I'd forgotten my bike lock, it looks like lunch was going to be somewhere I could keep an eye on the bike now, oh well. Leaving the ute in the nice park at Boolarra I saddled up and after resetting the GPS I was off up to Mirboo North. At 13 kilometres each way this wasn't going to be a particularly long ride (I ride further each way to work and back every day) so I was pretty confident that today would be a cruisey day.

The Grand Ridge Rail Trail on the climb to Darlimurla.

The trail climbs gently most of the way up to Mirboo North, passing through agricultural land, pine plantations and a fair bit of native vegetation as well. The surface of the rail trail was either crushed granite or a few short sections of dirt which all made for easy going on my mountain bike. I figured that I'd stop a bit on the climb up and then coast back down from Mirboo North and that's how it turned out. The first points of real interest to me were a couple of fairly substantial bridges that had been put in, and a little bit later the old Darlimurla Station.  A lot of this infrastructure was funded by the Bushfire Recovery Fund after bushfires tore through here in January 2009. The fund was set up to get the small local communities back on their feet.

The trail crosses a couple of these substantial bridges.

The site of the old Darlimurla Station.

Leaving the old Darlimurla Station the trail continues its climb to Mirboo North, the climbing was all middle ring stuff, nothing remotely steep. The country changed a bit after leaving Darlimurla Station and started to pass through mostly native vegetation, with its ferns and eucalypts it was an enjoyable section of the ride. After about an hour I arrived at the Mirboo North trail head having barely raised a sweat, now I had been planning to go to the Grand Ridge Brewery for lunch but after checking out the bike security situation I decided that I'd better just head to the old standard fall back, the bakery.

Between Darlimurla and Mirboo North the trail passes through more native bush.

Grabbing a pie and a coke from the bakery I sat in the park in the shade and watched the world pass by. Mirboo North was really humming today, its been a long time since I've been up into the Strzelecki Rangers but my memories were of an area that had largely been overlooked by tourists, today however it was bustling with all manor of punters, maybe that's because it was in the middle of a long weekend or maybe that's the way it is now? Anyway, after finishing lunch I pointed the bike back down towards Boolarra and let her go, the gradient was almost perfect, never steep enough to get up a stupid amount of speed but enough gradient to make peddling largely redundant. Less than thirty minutes after rolling out of Mirboo North I coasted to a stop beside the ute, it had been a nice easy introduction into one day bike touring.

The Mirboo North end of the Grand Ridge Rail Trail, that's the Grand Ridge brewery above the trail.

Lunch in the park at Mirboo North.

The Dirt.
The Grand Ridge Rail Trail is a short family friendly adventure. I rode a total of 26.2 kilometres and climbed 216 metres on my return journey. I started at Boolarra and climbed up to Mirboo North to get any climbing out of the way in the first half of the ride.  Mirboo North has a wider selection of places to eat. Boolarra is two to three hours from Melbourne so it is a bit of a drive to get there, and the Strzelecki Rangers are famous for the amount of precipitation they get so check the forecast.