Flow Mountain Bike acknowledges the Traditional Owners, the Darumbal People who are the original custodians of Rockhampton and the surrounding area. We recognise their connection to lands, waters and communities and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.
First Turkey Mountain Bike Park is laid onto the side of Nurim/Mount Archer. We’ve visited a few times over the years and had a ripping around the well throughout the trail network. And when folks from the Club explained some of their vision for the future, the 600 vertical meters on offer had us salivating with potential.
Some of that vision is one step closer, with the Rockhampton Council voting in favour of a Master Plan developed by the Rockhampton Mountain Bike Club to not only improve and add to the network but also raise its profile as a riding destination.
We caught up with Myall Stevens and Rolley Tickner from the Rockhampton Mountain Bike Club to find out what’s planned, what the council vote means, and the challenges still ahead of the Club to achieve what’s laid out in this document.
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How did we get here?
First Turkey Mountain Bike Park is on council land that the Club leases. With that, the Mountain Bike Club is responsible for keeping the park running, hosting events, maintaining trails and the like.
“We get about 200 hours of volunteer hours a quarter of maintenance, but even pre-Covid, it was starting to get to the point where it was getting a bit tired, and we just couldn’t keep up with it. Our Club only has about 200 members,” explains Stevens.
At about that time, there were discussions in the Club about trying to get AusCycling State Championships, attracting more events and establishing Rocky as more of a regional hub in Central Queensland.
There were heaps of ideas floating around the Club, and it had acknowledged a master plan would be needed going forward to attract the funding needed to action any of it. Being a town planner, when Stevens moved Rocky and got involved with the Club, he pulled together the polished document needed to start the wheels turning.
The master plan was presented to the Rockhampton Council, and in January, the local councillors voted to provide in-principle support.
“What this means is that the Council and the Councillors are happy to run forward with whatever proposals and plans we can do, but basically, they’re not responsible for maintenance or funding,” he says. “What they will do is help us along the path if we go to them with funding, and we go to them with an idea, then they will help us get it and push it through.”
“Prior to this, the Council was a bit hamstrung in how they could actually help,” he says.
Removing restrictions to help First Turkey stay in better condition
One of the biggest wins for the Club is that this master plan will now feature in the lease to the Club, which means maintenance and improvements can be made with less red tape to navigate.
“Prior to this, they (the Council) would have had to go down the path of amending the lease before they could agree to do anything more to help. The lease is quite restrictive in that it says you can do maintenance, and that’s pretty much it. Now the lease will reference the master plan saying that works can happen on that land, consistent with the master plan,” Stevens explains.
Previously, the Club was restricted to largely only being able to conduct maintenance, and anything that included improvement, whether that be realigning trails to fix ongoing issues, fully rebuilding something or creating a new trail, was met with quite a lot of resistance because of the terms of the lease.
Even with the Council taking up this master plan, according to Stevens, it’s more of a hands-off approach.
“Advance Rockhampton is the tourism authority that’s part of the Council. They effectively use three pillars of attraction: mountain biking, fishing and the natural landscape/food, depending on the way you look at it, because they use the beef industry. Yet the Council hasn’t up to this point been willing to invest into the trails at First Turkey,” says Stevens.
The Council has previously pushed for some investment in mountain biking, thanks to a $600,000 AUD grant from Round 3 of the Works for Queensland program. However, according to Trailforks and the Club, the network around Dam No.7 in Mount Morgan is currently overgrown and in serious need of maintenance. Advance Rockhampton has also helped to make our last trip to Rockhampton in 2021 possible.
“That (money) could have gone a long way at First Turkey. If we can get to the point where we have four or five top-to-bottom trails — really well built, that the Club isn’t constantly working on — then the club can focus on upgrading some of the other trails that need attention,” says Tickner.
Upgrading the First Turkey Mountain Bike Reserve
Beyond some lovely mango trees and a bit of grass, the trailhead at First Turkey isn’t really a trailhead — though there is a lovely landscaped and manicured trail hub a few hundred meters in.
The main goal is to have the basics covered — parking lot, toilets, showers, maybe even a bike wash, and a skills park.
At face value, this may seem like the most mundane aspect of the master plan, especially when you delve a bit further into the document and see adventure trails coming off the top of Nurim/Mount Archer
While the Club considers the trailhead upgrades the most achievable piece of the puzzle, they will also help further establish Rocky as a hub in Central Queensland.
“Quite a significant number of travellers come through the area — this is both walkers up to the national park, as well as mountain bikers,” says Stevens.
Rocky is located about 1.5 hours from Gladstone and 4.5 hours from Finch Hatton. Everything in Queensland is a long way from everything else, so if you’re road-tripping around the state to ride — or even check out national parks, camp or wherever else — you’ll be sitting in the car for some time.
“Being where it (First Turkey) is, there is no competition around. People will travel three or four hours to get here because it is a relatively significant elevation compared to anything in Mackay or Gladstone or anything else,” says Stevens.
As Stevents explained, if you ride for a couple of hours in the morning, you’ll probably want to shower before you head out for another three or four hours on the road. If you’re coming up from the Sunshine Coast or down from Finch Hatton, and people know these facilities are at First Turkey, they’re more likely to build some time to ride in Rockhampton.
The master plan also lays out upgrades to some of the existing trails, which after years of storms, have fallen into disrepair, like the Dirt Clowns Jump Park and making some of the most popular trails in the network, like Megatron K9 and Pegasus, more sustainable.
Stevens says the goal is to have a professional builder come in and clean up these trails, reducing the club’s maintenance burden.
“Most of the time, it’s pretty dry and dusty here, but when it rains, it really rains, and those trails, in particular, suffer because of it. So the goal would be to better prepare them for that,” he says.
The master plan also lays out a framework to potentially revamp and sanction a cluster of trails on the opposite side of Moores Creek. If you look on Trailforks now, these are listed as ‘proposed trails’, and Stevens tells Flow the Club has tried to actually have them removed from the map as they are so overgrown you can’t ride them anyway, though they were at some point.
“They existed at some point, but the Club just didn’t have the volunteer hours at the time to look after them. If we can get the funding, we’ll explore doing them properly,” he says.
Shuttle access riding and signature descents off Nurim/Mount Archer
The long-term goal the Club is hoping to achieve is a descent from the top of Nurim/Mount Archer.
These signature trail concepts would be in the ballpark of 6km, which then connects to the trail network, taking in the full vertical drop of Nurim/Mount Archer. There was once an unsanctioned black gravity trail called The Dawg that descended from here, but according to the Club, it has since been closed.
What the Club is proposing isn’t wildly unrealistic—a blue and green descent stemming off the paved road to the top of Nurim Mountain Archer. This would give First Turkey its big adventure trail product, which could drive tourism — as we’ve seen at networks across the country — but it would also create a commercial avenue for someone to step in and start a shuttle business.
However, the big hurdle is Queensland National Parks, which manages a key section of the land. The Club’s lease only goes about three-quarters of the way up Mount Archer, so to access the road, a portion of the trail would need to traverse land under the National Parks’ tenure.
“In the meetings we’ve had with National Parks, they’ve said that they don’t support gravity trails in their National Parks, they only support adventure trails,” Stevens explains.
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The Club has taken this into account, and Stevens explains that one option could be to make the quarter that runs through the national park quite mellow—light blue or even green—into another hub, which would sit on the Club’s lease and have all manner of trails emanate from it.
“We just don’t really know how yet to get around the National Parks policy in that regard and also the significant cost of it. National Parks want everything under the sun investigated, and there’s probably between $200,000 AUD and $500,000 AUD worth of environmental and engineering investigations that need to happen because part of it would run through a National Park,” Stevens explains.
One key point Stevens stressed is the goal of creating something that generates revenue, which can be reinvested in the trails and relieve some of the burden on volunteers.
“If we’re just relying on grants all of the time and club membership, it won’t ever be sustainable, so we have to work out a way to commercialise a component of something that gives a return back to the club,” says Stevens.
What comes next?
The Club is under no illusions that their job is not done after the Council has voiced its support for what they are trying to accomplish. The plan is to look bigger and start lobbying politicians and show the value First Turkey provides. But they also aren’t content with the Council as a silent partner.
The Council and the Rowing Club in Rockhampton are pushing pretty hard to have the Olympics rowing here and build a facility. The Council would look for some return on the investment to build this facility. A large portion would come at the Olympics, but it would also likely mean hosting regular events in the Fitzroy River, where there are regular sightings of a 4.5m croc.
So if they’re willing to spend a bunch of money to bring athletes to paddle boats in a river that larger crocodiles call home, why can’t they also fund trails where no one risks being eaten by a crocodile?
“Ultimately, we’re talking about regional development aiming to turn Rockhampton into more of a sporting hub,” Stevens says
Some of that depends on the Club’s ability to demonstrate the amount of traffic the trails receive. The Council has said that until they have data to show how busy the trails actually are, the club cannot do much.
At this stage, the Club is working on implementing a robust user traffic system. However, they do have access to a shared counter with National Parks on the Zamia Trail. For years, this trail was used only for walking, and the counter shows declining use. In 2021, it was revamped as a dual-use trail, and in the following two years, it was integrated into the trail network as part of the Pegasus Green Trail.
The Club shared the most recent counter data available, demonstrating declining use until it was integrated into the trail network and a significant uptick in traffic. Of course, it’s only one trail and probably not the most popular, but it still provides some insights into network traffic and shows growth.
With the Master Plan now endorsed by the Council, it not only outlines the way forward for First Turkey but paves the way for the Club to start to seek funding and outside support for improvements to the network; it also pushes the local government and National Parks for support.
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