Timber Trail Pt. I: Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal

The Timber Trail is one of New Zealand’s most famous mountain bike trails. 82 kilometers, 1,550 meters of elevation gain, a two-day ride for most who attempt it. (That’s 51 miles long and a mile of elevation gain for you non-metrics. Two days is still two days.) If you’re riding the Tour Aotearoa, add another 50 km and 600 meters of elevation to get to the Trail from the sleepy little village of Mangakino.

This is the third most difficult thing I attempted last weekend.

Nearly all the elevation gain is from Mangakino to the trailhead. Still, it only ranks third. Check it out in my guidebook:

(By the way, those penciled-in numbers are my cumulative distance ridden so far. To put them in the appropriate context for this blog, Frodo and Sam walked 732 km from Hobbiton to Rivendell. My total ride from Cape Reinga to Bluff is almost exactly the distance from the Shire to Mount Doom.)

The most difficult thing I attempted this weekend, which I still have not achieved, is getting on the interwebs. I bought a dumbphone just to be a hotspot for my smartphone, so I could do things like know where the hell I’m going. For four weeks this worked great. Then it stopped. Inexplicably. Not even Young People have been able to fix it.

Not a major problem. It would be nice to text with family and get caught up with the blog (still a week behind), but otherwise the only inconvenience is I don’t have GPS. My GPS compooter is supposed to have that well in hand, right?

Sadly not. It’s much better than the last one: it worked for almost two weeks before its sudden but inevitable betrayal. Nevertheless, it’s a functional compass and odometer, which is all I need to confirm where I am in my guidebooks.

But for the Timber Trail, not even a guidebook is necessary. It is almost oppressively well marked, with milestones (kilometerstones?) the whole way and signposts at almost every turn. It’s also hard to get lost when you know your only job is to bike all the way up, then all the way down.

The climb is breathtaking in every sense. The first bridge to cross is chainlink fence bent into a long, skinny taco about four inches narrower than Booster’s handlebars. We had to go single file, me backwards and her forwards, with all her bags left behind for a second and third trip. I can carry them all in one go but the bridge is too tippy not to have a hand free.

The bridges along the Trail itself are much sturdier, as they see so much more traffic. But they’re still thrilling to cross. They’re like a spiderweb in the first phase of construction, one main line with a few offshoots to anchor it. Strong as steel, thank goodness, but it still feels like walking a tightrope. And the tightrope is a good 100 feet over the rushing river below.

What goes up must come down, of course, and the descent takes the silver medal for most difficult things I tried this weekend. Even after my near-disastrous experience on the Tasmanian Trail, it still surprises me that downhill is so much harder than up. But this post is already overly long, so I’ll save that tale for next time.