NORTH? SURE!
It's ominous. I am ushered into the park ranger’s office and I feel a wave of déjà vu. I’ve seen the insides of land managers' offices before… and yup, there are the maps with the illegal trails highlighted on the table.
“We’ve got concerns,” Martin Krieg, Senior Planner at Parks Wildlife and Heritage starts.
“We have all these mountain bike trails to build. We're going to be really busy making sure they are really good trail experiences, rolled out in a relatively short period of time”.
Hang on a minute… I'm not in trouble? Over the next hour the rangers lay out the plans to roll out more trails than we could reasonably hope for. Am I dreaming?
The Northern Territory government earlier this year announced a 'Turbo Charging Tourism' stimulus package, with words like '$100 million' and 'mountain bike' being used a lot, often in conjunction with words like 'National Park'. But what is the potential? We leave the meeting with pages of notes and plans for three weeks of non-stop trail hunting.
The goal for our road trip was simple. Ride every piece of singletrack we could find and check out the new areas under the Turbo Charging Tourism
