Picture this: you’re on your bike halfway up a mountain, in winter, and it’s nearly dark. Your GPS head unit has run out of juice and your riding companions are nowhere to be seen. Navigational guidance has been reduced to a half-remembered Strava file you looked at the previous day, and you’re literally at a crossroads – with a couple of layers of Lycra your only protection from the elements – faced with two options: left or right.
Needless to say, it’s not an ideal situation – but it’s one I recently found myself in, somewhere in the mountains above Bright in Victoria, dusk shadows quickly turning into something darker and more dangerous.
The concept, when presented to me a few months earlier, sounded like a fun one: the shortest day of the year and a long, mountainous gravel ride through Victoria’s High Country. It would be a race against the clock with darkness and a beer festival presenting the ideal finish line. Sounds like a great day out, right?
Well, right up until that moment, it had been. Note to self: when riding for 10 hours or more, bring a battery pack (or upgrade your bike computer).
Now, for more pressing matters: left or right?
Freeze and defrost
As a Sydneysider, any temperature in the single digits is freezing, and when it’s down in the negative ones and twos, well, that’s positively Arctic.
It’s - 2 when we park at Benalla station just before dawn to meet our companions on today’s adventure, and I’m shivering as soon as I step out of the car. On team , it’s me, two-wheeled photographer extraordinaire Esjay, and our good buddy Jake. Bikes unloaded, we bump gloved fists with a few familiar and not-so-familiar faces, united today by
