Attaquer Stories Lake Eucumbene with Tom and Lachlan

HIGH COUNTRY BIKEPACKING WITH TOM AND LACHLAN
Written by: Lachlan Roberts
Photos by: Thomas MacDonald

I have a theory. I think bikes are the best way to see a place. Not so fast that you miss the details, the way the sun shades the contours of the landscape, the colour of seasonal flowers and the occasional chat with a friendly local. Not so slow that the process becomes tedious or the objective too modest.

Tom and I have been mates since school and we’ve travelled together in about as many ways as are reasonable, car to canoe, train to telemark skis. More recently, I’ve wanted to introduce Tom to another: bikepacking. I've pestered him since discovering the subtle delights of lycra and exotic groupsets like so many others during lockdown. Finally I cracked him. Our aim was simple: ride around Lake Eucumbene right to it’s northern tip, Tom’s favourite fishing spot.

We set off late on Saturday morning and as is tradition on these trips, we hadn’t finished packing the night before. I also had to convince Tom that not wearing undies underneath your bibs is not a prank, but a much more comfortable way to travel. After google verified my claim, we set off. Our delay gave the wind a sizable head start, it was blowing a gale, coaxing furious whitecaps and 10 metre tall water spouts from the usually glassy alpine lake. This wasn’t nearly enough to bend our spirits though. I was excited to see a part of Australia I didn’t know that well and perhaps even more by the prospect of trout at the other end. Being in the mountains, the road went upwards right away. We climbed and climbed until the peaks around us turned white. “Do you reckon we’re headed up there? It would be a laugh to see some snow this weekend” I asked Tom. Neither of us had considered the possibility of snow… in the snowy mountains… in the middle of winter.

"As adventure-enthusiasts we have short memories and hard climbs are quickly forgotten when the freehub starts whirring."

Eventually we reached a patchwork of dirty white mounds and gravel. The patchwork turned into a high thread-count sheet, not a gravel blemish in sight. It turns out, you can’t ride any old bike in the snow. Your front wheel cuts a canyon to the underlying dirt while your back wheel spins aimlessly. So… we started to walk. It was funny at first, a reminder of our unorthodox holiday planning. Our view became increasingly more white, this wasn’t just an interlude.

We walked for another hour and a half to reach the highest point of the trip. The unobstructed views of Lake Eucumbene’s treeless outcroppings turned, at last, into a downhill road. This meant no more pushing uphill and, hopefully, less snow. Wet gravel scars separated the melting snow patches. The spells of gravel let us gain enough speed to plough through the white islands. We were entertained by this game for an hour or so, the gentle jack-knifing, moguls on wheels. Mercifully, the snow melted away to nothing, leaving kilometres of champagne gravel descending to the campsite.

A smirk was stretching across Tom’s face, maybe I had convinced him about bike packing. Then he had a puncture. Followed by another one 20 minutes later. We used our spare tube for the first flat, and reached for the patch kit for the second. After a thorough patting down of every pocket however, we realised we left it behind, resigning ourselves to another hour and a bit of walking to camp and no trout for dinner. We set camp, warmed ourselves with a fire, tinned soup and some generous nips of bundy, guaranteeing a good night’s sleep.

The next morning was warm and still. To finish the trip we had to cross the Eucumbene river, a line of ex snowflakes resigned to their fate as a trout toilet. The water was freezing, the kind of cold that makes your breathing rapid and shallow and hurts when you try to warm up again. The sun baked mud of the bank squirting up between our toes sped up the recovery of sensation, maybe Gwenyth Paltrow is onto something. We spent the rest of the morning unsuccessfully looking for fish.

At the end of it all, it was nice to share my love of cycling with the mate who I learnt to love the outdoors with, some kind of reciprocity I guess? Hopefully I can convince him to go again, maybe next time with less walking… and snow.