Flow acknowledges the rolling hills and forests around Creswick hold significant cultural importance to the Dja Dja Wurrung First Peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land.We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
There have been informal trails in Creswick for years, and for a trail network that has been ticking off the bureaucratic boxes and then building away, it’s been in the news more than most similar projects.
And that’s because of the Commonwealth Games. For those who have only just surfaced from their cave for the first time in the last 12 months, the Victorian Games were set to roll into several regional cities around the state — Geelong, Bendigo, Ballarat and, of course, Creswick, which was to host the XCO.
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Then we got word that the event, which was initially going to cost $2.5-billion, had ballooned as much as $7-billion AUD! Of course, the trail network at Creswick had been approved and funded by the Hepburn Shire Council long before any of the Comm Games argie bargie started, and the 60km trail network is a little more than halfway complete.
We caught up with Mark Eccleston from Dirt Art, who is managing the project, to see how things have been coming along in Creswick and for a preview of what the trails will look like.
To Comm Games or not to Comm Games, that is the question
According to Eccleston, the decision not to bring the King’s dog and pony show to Victoria hasn’t had much, if any, effect on what they are doing.
“Frankly, it has not changed the project at all,” says Eccleston. “The only thing really is that we don’t have to keep in the back of our mind that potentially some of this trail in this area may be used for the Games to make it compliant.”
Unlike the Gold Coast, where Dirt Art constructed three separate loops at Nerang specifically for the event — which are still there today — instead, the course would have used trails within the network. So it’s not like by no longer having the games, Creswick lost five or 10km of trail.
Common Ground put together the original design with 100km of singletrack however that has due to a number of constraints only the 60km north of Melbourne road will be constructed.
“We’ve been working our way through the Common Grounds Trail development plan. We’ve tweaked it in a few spots,” says Eccleston. “Just in a way tweaking the way that we do things and try to refine it to what we think will work the best.”
Choose your riding zone
With that the network is still divided up into separate riding zones, each using the terrain to cater to a specific riding experience. As Eccleston noted most of this is north of Melbourne Road, however, there is one incursion south of the tracks, and that’s for the Freeride Zone.
“Starting the furthest away from town is Cosgraves, which is more of an XC riding area. Then we have Woodcoop/Forest, which is just to the north of Cosgraves, which is another XC/trail riding area — we’re pretty much finished with those we’re just waiting on some platforms to come,” he says
“Make no bones about it, that is really XC/trail riding. That’s where you get out there and do a quick 20km, there’s some good rolling fun trail out there.
“Then we’ve got the Woodcoop/Forest link zone, the next zone getting closer to town. This links the more XC and trail-riding zones into the Gravity Zone. So that zone has some gravity trails, a bit of descending and bit of climbing, and a couple of link trails further out to Cosgraves and Woodcoop/Forest,” Eccleston continues.’
Then it’s into the skills and Gravity Zone, which as you can probably guess, are predominantly descending trails with a couple of climbs back out. Creswick doesn’t have a tonne of elevation on tap, so where there is some to work with, the crew from Dirt Art maximised what the contours of the land provided.
Running out from the Hammon Park trailhead along the southern side of St Georges Lake there is the Spine Trail. Eccleston explains that this will essentially be the highway to get you from the trailhead out to the further extremes of the trail network. It’s multi-use and adaptive-friendly, making for 12.5km of adaptive-friendly riding split across 8 trails.
Finally, there‘s also an adventure riding zone on the cards as well.
Eccleston tells Flow his teams are currently building in the Woodcoop/Forest and the Gravity and Skill zone at the moment, with the Freeride and Adventure Zones still to come.
The network has been put together and organised to offer a wide variety of riding to suit a huge cross-section of mountain bikers and incorporate features that aren’t currently on offer in the region. And when pressed about what the defining part of the Creswick trail network would be, Eccleston said it depends on what style of rider you are.
“We have one of our best jump builders quietly working his way down a section that’s in a pine plantation. I think that trail, particularly, will open a lot of people’s eyes to what a well-constructed, well-considered jumps trail can be,” says Eccleston
He also tells us about a black enduro trail that sticks out in his mind and has a bit of spice and a bit of jank to it that Eccleston predicts will be especially popular.
Into the upside-down
Creswick is a bit of a geological anomaly. Due to the mining history, the dirt here is what they call upside-down soil, and the rock here is formed into reefs.
“The whole strata there has been turned upside down over millennia. So there is a lot more clay on the surface than you would expect, and the rock we’ve got there is a sandstone base,” he says.
And the Dirt Art crew has used this to their advantage, creating features out of these reefs.
“We’ve been able to turn one into a wall ride which is pretty cool. On another one we’ve sent the trail straight down these rocky reefs with a nice lander down at the bottom. The whole idea is when we do have this rock in front of us, let’s milk it as much as we possibly can,” says Eccleston.
Of course, Creswick is smack dab in the Victorian Goldfields region, and with that, there is a boatload of mining history. Eccleston tells us these artefacts from the days of resource extraction have made the project a bit more complex.
“Obviously, we have to stay away from anything which is an abandoned shaft, but we also have to try and avoid areas where the ground has been worked in the past, like big sluicing areas, because they’re so unstable,” he says.
Eccleston tells us a lot of the reroutes they have done is to avoid those big sluicing areas to make better use of the terrain. But there’s also the cultural heritage aspect, which has further constrained how the trail builders can interact with these old pieces of infrastructure.
“There are some old water races which we have to cross. Those have been incorporated into trails, but we can’t use them as features. There is a specific methodology we have to follow, which is basically cross them at 90º and, where possible, put rock paving in to minimise impacts,” says Eccleston.
While the European heritage has created headaches for the build team, the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage will be put on display front and centre.
“The client (Hepburn Council) has engaged the local Dja Dja Wurrung Aboriginal Community to help come up with the signage package. They will use a lot of their stories to come up with the names for the trails,” he says. “The Council will also use some of the local mining heritage to inform the naming of the trails.”
Patience is a virtue
While from the outside, it would have seemed the Comm Games will-it-won’t-it would have created quite a number of headaches for the build team. Fortunately, that ripple wasn’t large enough to unsettle anything for the trail builds.
Eccleston tells us the most challenging aspects have been working across multiple land tenures and ensuring that all of the right boxes have been ticked for each individual land manager because the checklist can differ so widely between them. The weather hasn’t been particularly kind either.
“During winter, the biggest challenge we had was that it was so wet. Quite literally, when I would turn up on sight, I’d grow an inch as I walked around (from the mud built up on the bottom of my boots). By summertime, it’s been so dry, and the dirt turns into talcum powder.”
The other issue they have been dealing with is keeping people out, and have had to waste quite a lot of time on repairs because of folks coming in to check out what their crew has been working on.
On that note, Eccleston asked us to stress that while it may seem harmless to pop in for a peak, it creates extra work for them and has the potential to be a major issue.
“It’s still an active worksite, and if someone is injured on our worksite, the liability falls back on us. Even if you are in there for the best intentions and get injured, it winds up being my responsibility and becomes a real headache,” he says.
Where does Creswick fit in?
Creswick has an existing riding community and, with its proximity to Melbourne, has a substantial number of folks who make day trips out to the area.
But it’s not alone; just in a small radius, you have Daylesford, Castlemaine, Harcourt and Ballan, to name a few — so where does this new network fit in among the crowd?
“Creswick will have a bit more gravity involved than a lot of what is around, so I don’t think they’re competing with one another, but they’re sort of working together,” Eccleston told Flow.
“You’ll be able to take your three-year-old on a balance bike for a ride around the lake. Then if Mum wants to go send some black jumps, they’ll be able to do that too. I think it’ll draw families in like that because of the diversity of the riding experience,” says Eccleston.
Dirt Art still has a little way to go with the build, and they weren’t quite ready to put an opening date on the network. Good things come to folks that wait, once we have an idea of when the trails will be ready for riders we’ll update this page. In the meantime, please stay off the trails, as you’re only delaying the opening date but riding them early.
Photos: Alex Jovanovic