Bike Rides and Rainy Days
Looking out our living room window over a sun filled day on Lake Wakatipu and the Remarkables mountain range, it’s hard to remember just how rainy it was a few days ago. The weather comes and goes here so quickly and so intently. One minute we are watching the trees start to change color and commenting on how short the summer was and the next minute we are lathering on the sunscreen and complaining of the heat. It’s a typical New Zealand summer.
We got back on our bikes this weekend and discovered two new trails in the area. The first, called Fernhill Loop, may actually take first place as our favorite Queenstown ride. It’s shaded by beech trees the entire way, sometimes shading it so much that it is hard to see, and winds slowly around the hillside from the gondola. Although a loop trail, we turned around at the top to ride right back down what we came up. Next time we will complete the loop. The down was, of course, the best part . . . not super steep but fast and flowing. Local bikers seem to take pride in the number of features in a trail instead of the length of a trail. A lot of the trails that we have found are really short but filled with features like wooden bridges, ramps, jumps, and short banking turns. Although we’ve enjoyed these types of rides and features (I admit I’ve only tried a handful of these features because most of them scare the crap out of me), there’s nothing like a mostly straight, fast, flowing section of single track where you don’t have to worry about what’s coming around the next corner.
Our second bike excursion for the weekend was a haul up Coal Pit Road to a trail called Water Racetrack. We took our time climbing the steep-as road to the saddle and then followed the Water Racetrack out and around a section of mountain that sits behind the Remarkables. It really gave us some perspective on how much open undeveloped land there is down here. Although a relatively easy ride out the track, we had it handed to us on another steep climb to the ridge, followed by a huge descent all the way to the car. I only ended up stuck in a bush once . . . this was, of course, after BJ had been thinking to himself “damn, Lisa’s going for it.”
But our weekend wasn’t all about biking and sunshine. We spent the majority of Sunday morning and afternoon watching the rain pour down, eating breakfast and reading on the couch with our roommate Ali. All three of us finished our books that day and BJ and I “celebrated” by going into town and buying some more books. We’ve never read this much in Jackson . . . New Zealand is really turning us into nerds.