If you have only been riding mountain bikes for a handful of years, the cosy Victorian town of Mount Beauty may not be on your radar. A nice day’s pedalling or shuttling on a longer trip to the more established trail towns of Bright and Falls Creek, maybe. An increasing number of Victorian junior downhill racers definitely know it as the most unforgiving race on the state’s calendar. The truth is that mountain biking in Mount Beauty has a rich and interesting history and played a big part in the formative years of our sport in Australia.
After spending the months following Melbourne’s lockdowns going back and forth, I relocated to Mount Beauty in late spring of 2022. The access to remote, backcountry riding really sealed my desire to live in this cute little town and it’s that same sense of exploration and adventure in the mountains that led the original pioneers of Australian mountain biking to firstly seek out, and then start building new places to ride in the early 90s. Pioneers like Bernie McArdle.
‘The whole area, where the trailhead carpark and barbeque area is now, that all used to just be big horse paddocks. We had a little fenced off path we could use to get through onto Pole Track and we just started exploring from there,’ Bernie says of the origins of riding on Big Hill.
Big Hill is an understatement really, as far as names for a hill go. When you’re at the trailhead or even in the town of Mount Beauty itself, you’d be forgiven for asking ‘what hill?’ But head a little further away, to the other side of the pondage in the middle of town, and you can see the top. At 1385m, Big Hill sits a little over a thousand metres above town, still 600m shy of Mount Bogong, also visible from town. A long history of hydroelectric infrastructure and cattle grazing on the even higher alpine plains facilitated a network
