GOOD TRAILS IN GOOD COMPANY

Let me start at the end. In fact, not even the end, but weeks later. When I was back in Sydney, in my inner city suburb of Kings Cross with its high rises and construction, its cement and tar, its clubs and hostels, where the dull hum of traffic and blaring of horns and the screech of raucous drunks float up to and through my windows and can rarely be escaped, day or night. And yet I had. Escaped that is, carried away emotionally from the grit and din of the Cross by the fizz still lingering from four-days’ bikepacking through the Victorian high country.

This wasn’t merely a buzz from having traded the big smoke for cathedral stands of mountain ash or for soft meadows of high alpine grasses. Nor from riding along high and lonely ridgelines or – in the deep folds of the land – tracing rivers that ran wild and free, although it would be wrong to say that none of this played a role. But more so, this was a buzz borne of pure adrenaline. And that’s what made it so remarkable, because adrenaline isn’t something generally associated with bikepacking. Regular mountain biking, sure. Especially if it’s of the ears-pinned downhilling variety. But bikepacking? Usually you’re so encumbered by gear – and thus restricted to trails too tame – that you’re limited to an experience akin to bushwalking on bikes. Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with this – it’s still amazing. It’s merely to state that bikepacking isn’t an endeavour usually associated with adrenaline, let alone shots so thumpingly large they’re tingling through your system weeks later.

Buller, uniquely as far as I know, lets you link huts while still riding large amounts of quality, genuine singletrack.

Then again, the high country around Mount Buller isn’t your typical bikepacking destination. For starters, there is the end. Plan your trip right and you can finish on what’s surely one of the greatest finales of any bikepacking journey on the