Newcastle’s Glenrock | From Nuisance to National Treasure in Mountain Biking

Glenrock Mountain Bike Park is a park within a national park. A small piece of stunning Awabakal Country, the area is filled with more than 60,000 years of history, stories, artefacts and indigenous wisdom. Located five kilometres from the modern-day Newcastle CBD, the park is home to some of Australia’s oldest surviving mountain bike trails, five of seven remaining areas of Littoral Rainforest in the lower Hunter, and Australia’s first copper smelter.

The national park is currently named Glenrock State Conservation Area due to mining contracts that were active in the area when it was first gazetted as a protected place in 1986. Now that those contracts are finished, a process is underway to see it renamed Glenrock National Park.

Around one million people pass through this park each year. Mountain bikers make up one of the largest user groups, along with trail runners, walkers, surfers, hang gliders, horse riders and more. Glenrock’s proximity to the city is a huge part of its appeal, but once you’re in the park, there is so much to explore.

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Goannas dart up trees, echidnas waddle trailside, rare orchids flower for a week a year and playful dolphins share the waves with surfers. The sprawling variety of trails are surrounded by beaches. There’s also a sewage treatment plant at one end, a water tank at another and giant piles of coal integrated into the trails. There’s no tap. There’s no toilet.

Ask any mountain biker in the area about Glenrock and they’ll tell you it’s one of the most beautiful places to ride in the country, and they wish more people knew it was a national park. Maintaining this delicate balance, and efforts from the surrounding community to do so, is at the heart of Glenrock’s story.

Last time we reported on Glenrock, a Draft Plan of Management and Draft Mountain Bike Plan were available for public comment. The public submission process went well, but there had been no further news about the approval of either plan for almost two years, until January 2025 when the Plan of Management for Glenrock State Conservation Area was finally approved.

The Draft Mountain Bike Plan is still with the Minister for Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Heritage, Penny Sharpe, waiting for approval as well. Local mountain bikers are hopeful for news any day now about the Mountain Bike Plan, while simultaneously holding their collective breath in case the reality is the waiting time is a lot longer.

We caught up with trail builders, skills coaches, local businesses, community leaders and local rangers to learn more about what’s happening while the Glenrock State Conservation Area has been seemingly stuck in a perpetual waiting zone, what that means for riders, and caring for the trails and the environment that surrounds them.

We conducted most of these interviews before the surprise approval of the Plan of Management. Given the Plan of Management references the Mountain Bike Plan for almost all mountain bike activities, we’ve kept the focus of this article on what the two documents mean when both can be put into action and what’s been happening in the meantime.

What we discovered was not one story but several; stories that resonate with many other trail networks around the country and the creative ways different parts of the surrounding communities work together to make them the amazing places they are.

The Heart of Glenrock’s MTB Scene | Who Rides and Why

Turn up to the Gun Club Road trailhead on a weekday afternoon and you’ll see a stack of kids on bikes with friends, parents or doing a skills clinic, plus lots of local adults out for a post-work pedal. You’ll see people on the latest gear and folks in singlets and footy shorts. We once saw a young girl wearing a sequined party outfit, wings, skirt and all, happily ducking into the trails with her mum.

“It’s part of every mountain biker in Newcastle’s development of becoming a mountain biker,” said Laura Renshaw Hunter Mountain Bike Club secretary, trail builder, community builder, health worker and lightning-fast racer. “It’s a great stepping stone for getting into mountain biking and then discovering how much good riding we have in Newcastle and around the area.”

The trails offer a little bit of everything – except for sustained, technical downhills which are better sought out at nearby Awaba or Ourimbah.

“It’s so close to town and the view is stunning in there. One second you’re on a highway, next second you’re in the bush with no one to be seen or heard,” said Renshaw.

“There are so many trails and so many walks. You see animals just popping out in front of you on the trails…It’s beautiful,” said Carol Anderson, a Wonnarua woman and passionate bike rider who’s lived on Awabakal Country for over thirty years. “It’s a place for everybody. It can suit all abilities.”

Anderson works in the child protection and domestic violence space. She loves how calming it is to ride at Glenrock. The connection to nature is important culturally too.

Most mountain bikers are guests on this land, but Anderson is more aware of what that means than most white fella. “It’s very special, and it’s a privilege. I don’t treat it as a given or a right.”

It’s not a given or a right culturally. Nor is it a given or a right in terms of having trails in a national park. But this only scratches the surface of what it means to ride in Glenrock, to help take care of it, or how different people work together to achieve that.

From Conflict to Cooperation | How Mountain Bikers Became Part of the Solution

Most of the people we spoke to had been riding trails at Glenrock since the 1990s, back when mountain bikes were seen as a nuisance. The fact that these trails still exist today is thanks to the work of the Glenrock Trail Alliance, a group that formed to find ways to work with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service to legitimise the trails while upholding the conservation values of the area. By 2016, National Parks were hosting the barbecue at trail work days which is a testament to the efforts of many in legitimising the trail network.

The Glenrock Trail Alliance was initially led by Lenny Allen, and subsequently by Mick Plummer, two of the network’s OG riders and trail builders.

Plummer credits wanting to be part of the solution, not part of the problem, as key to formalising the network and finding productive ways of working with the different interests of park users and land managers.

“Everything that we do is to improve the trails, and everything is a kind of regeneration for Glenrock,” said Plummer. “It started out in a very poor condition. There’s a sewage treatment works there. There’s a gravel quarry. There’s a copper smelter. It was used for farming. There’s a coal mine. Not to mention the Shotgun Club. It had a train line running through it. It was so degraded.”

Plummer wishes more of today’s riders understood that because Glenrock is a National Park that means priority one is taking care of the natural environment for current and future users. Riding on trails completely surrounded by that natural environment is one of the massive attractions of being there.

It was Plummer who took on the incredibly delicate and laborious task of developing the Draft Mountain Bike Plan that sits alongside the Plan of Management.

It outlines close to 30km of trails that will be formally added to the network either as newly constructed trails or as upgraded versions of existing informal singletrack. There will be skills areas added to pre-disturbed land such as quarries and powerline easements, facilities (including toilets) and maintaining the trails will be a whole lot easier.

Some trails will be rehabilitated as they’ve been cut into areas of beautiful pre-settler vegetation that no one wants to see destroyed. Those trails could be made more sustainable, but it would be a costly process to do it in a way that meets the demands of riders of varying skill levels – partly due to safety concerns, and partly so people don’t cut B-lines into areas of bush that are better left untouched.

The new Plan of Management is meant to address all things Glenrock and lay out a direction for the future without being too restrictive in what can and can’t be done,” said Plummer.

“The superseded Plan of Management was seen to be too restrictive as in, ‘If it says you do this in the PoM then that’s what you must do. If it doesn’t say you can do it in the PoM, then you can’t do it.’”

Other reference documents like the Mountain Bike Plan are designed to sit alongside the Plan of Management to allow for extra flexibility.

“The draft plans were such a huge process to prepare,” said Plummer. “Public consultation went fairly well as far as I’m aware. Then it went back to the agency for that process – to go through all the management and then eventually to the minister.”

Progress was held up due to a change of government and other bureaucratic processes.

“Politically we don’t get as much favour as some other places,” said Plummer, showing the drain that happens to so many people who take on the amount of advocacy he has.

He’s the grassroots person, the one who was out there digging trails in the early days. Over time he became passionate about maintaining them and the bush around them, and got pulled into a much more complex system.

“Say, for instance, Thredbo, they’ve got this massive park within a national park, a big mountain bike park. They’ve got resources behind them, and they’ve got a massive reason to push that. Whereas for a volunteer to be going and lobbying and all of what it takes to get the interest for such a massive project it’s really – I guess I’ve got to admit I haven’t been able to manage it. We’ve tried a lot of different angles,” he said.

Prior to the Plan of Management getting the tick of approval, the old saying that no news is good news could not be more diametrically opposed to the purgatory Glenrock trail advocates have been trapped in. Along with other mountain bikers, he’s eagerly waiting for news on the Draft Mountain Bike Plan and what that means for the future of these trails.

“For the mountain bike trails I would say that implementation of the Plan of Management will immediately free up some of the existing restrictions – basically the current/previous ones would be ‘lifted’. At least there would be more ‘grey’ for the Rangers to work with,” he said.

“In saying that, I would think that no one is going to allow any major changes at the moment with the impending Mountain Bike Plan so close.”

Plummer lives near the trails and still rides there regularly. “It still makes me happy when I see kids ride past my place every day on mountain bikes,” he said.

“This probably wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t got off my arse and pushed for all this. And it is an awesome thing to see that.”

The Future of Glenrock | A Vision for Trail Growth and Sustainability

While change has been slow, and being in the waiting zone is incredibly frustrating, mountain biking pioneer and Director of World Trail Glen Jacobs has a contagiously optimistic outlook on the development of mountain biking in Australia and overseas.

“You’re going to get knockbacks here and there but those knockbacks aren’t anywhere near the knockbacks 10 and 20 years ago,” said Jacobs.

Jacobs and World Trail General Manager Gerard McHugh developed a comprehensive concept plan for mountain biking in Glenrock in 2016. While it looked amazing for what could happen in the area for mountain biking, World Trail hadn’t been properly briefed on all the restrictions they had to work within, causing another stalling point for the progress of trails in the park.

Plummer went through this concept plan meticulously with a view to what would and wouldn’t get approved as he developed the (much more conservative) Draft Mountain Bike Plan.

“We looked at everything and what could actually happen from a big-picture view. It certainly was the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen,” Jacobs said, speaking about the stunning coastline, escarpments, rainforest, soil type and proximity to the city.

“This can be the best place in Australia by far,” he said. “I know it’s not a big drop, a big fall, so you can’t actually have downhills there, but it reminded me of Derby.”

Jacobs explains that for growth to happen, data is king. We have so much more data on mountain biking now, which has been key to the funding, development and political support of other trail networks around the country. Data on the numbers of riders moving through a place, the economic benefits to small rural economies around the country, and data that disproves all number misconceptions that have held trail projects back in the past.

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As mountain bike tourism has exploded nationally, the trails in Glenrock have the potential to be another essential stop on any East Coast mountain bike holiday, bringing a significant amount of money into the local economy.

After working in the Air Force for 20 years, Damien Enderby founded Bike and Fitness a decade ago with his wife Jenny. Together they provide skills coaching to mountain bikers and orienteers from ages 4 to 75. Damien talks about the park and what he’d like to see happen there in the future with a level of passion characteristic of many of its users.

“Mountain biking brings in income all year round, and we’ve got a good climate where people can literally ride all year round,” he said.

“Places like Maydena close up through the winter, but this place could be open all year round. Once everyone realises the potential and invests it accordingly, it’d be a pretty cool place,” he said.

While some people we spoke to argue it’s a no-brainer to develop the trails into something that brings out-of-towners to Newcastle to ride all year long, others want it to stay smaller and quieter. Either way, ongoing maintenance is a constant issue, especially after a huge growth in riders during COVID-19 and the amount of rain that’s fallen since that time.

Building and Maintaining Trails | Progress, Challenges, and What’s Next

Mathew Rowland runs East Coast Mountain Trails, the company contracted to do recent rebuild and maintenance work on well-worn trails like Deluge, Shaft, Snakes and Ladders, Hang 10, Six Shooter and others. He and his team of four have also been busy building other popular trails in the region including tracks out at Dungog, Barrington, Awaba and Kempsey.

We caught up with Rowland just before he got stuck into rebuilding Kenny’s trail a popular descent full of fun twists and turns that starts at the main trailhead at Gun Club Road.

According to Strava, Kenny’s has been ridden almost 180,000 times by over 10,000 people – numbers which only include the kind of riders who are keen enough to log their rides and only in the time since Strava was invented. It wouldn’t surprise us if actual figures were more than 50 times higher.

With exposed roots and muddy sections that don’t get much chance to dry out, Kenny’s had become pretty trashed and was in need of some attention. Plummer had been trying to get permission to fix one particularly rutted-out section for three years.

“We’re pretty hamstrung as far as what we can do in there as part of maintenance,” Rowland said. “Until this Plan of Management goes through, we can’t really realign trails or defer too much from the current alignment, which is pretty frustrating because mountain biking’s evolved a lot over the years. A lot of the existing trails are fairly old,” Rowland said late last year.

This is why the hugely popular Deluge trail gets closed, worked on, reopened and then closed again.

Keeping on top of maintenance means that trails like Kennys that are marked as blue, don’t become black as they wear. It also prevents the erosion and deterioration that can begin to hurt the environment. As Rowland explains, sometimes updating a Plan of Management to allow for real fixes and progress is hampered because Parks don’t have the funding to complete the work that would be required. This isn’t necessarily the case at Glenrock.

While larger works at Glenrock are currently carried out by Rowland and the East Coast Mountain Trails team, smaller repairs and maintenance are also done by the rangers.

“The current rangers are super proactive and passionate about getting trail maintenance happening,” Rowland said, adding that local rangers Ash Deveridge and Kate Harrison are doing the work of about 100 people.

“They do an amazing job for the resources they have,” he added. “That’s why we’re in there and doing a lot of maintenance still.”

A lot of the work currently underway is funded by flood insurance, which is possible because Harrison had the foresight to get a report done on the area before the massive rains of 2022. A $600,000 AUD state government grant in 2021 also allowed for much-needed trail maintenance.

Instead of spending money re-repairing the same section of trail again and again, the new Plan of Management, designed to incorporate the Mountain Bike Plan, will mean more sustainable measures can be put in place without dealing with so much red tape.

“If you’ve got a trail going around a tree and the water’s coming onto the trail, there’s been no avenue to be able to move the trail to a different part of the hill so it drains better,” Rowland said.

There are some exceptions, like the reopened Shaft trail. Situated on pre-disturbed land the trail builders could work their magic. The updated trail feels bermy and wide, maintains much of the character of the original and includes features where riders can pick an easier line by staying left or a progressively harder line on the right. This makes it one that can still be enjoyed by trail runners too.

Funding the Future | The Role of Clinics, Events, and Races

Jason English runs skills sessions for 70-80 kids a week out at Glenrock with 10-12 coaches. The location of the park makes it easy for parents to drop the kids off and go for a walk together while they wait. Plus, the variety of terrain there is well suited to teaching different mountain bike skills. This has created another avenue for funding maintenance.

English pays National Parks about $10,000 AUD a year that gets funnelled back toward Glenrock through coaching, schools’ events and as an Eco Pass Holder. Because of this, the PE teacher, trail runner and six-time World Endurance Mountain Bike Organisation 24-hour solo champion has no qualms about asking for urgent trail repairs in return.

“Before events if I say, ‘Hey there’s a couple of holes at the end of Twisties where it’s a bit dangerous.’ I always say, ‘Can I go out there and just dump some gravel there, and they’ll just go, ‘No, no, no, you can’t because you’re not insured,’ and we’ll have somebody do that the next day,” he said.

English is not the only coach operating in the park, and he tells us that each business that does so all pay a $3.50 AUD a person for the privilege. And with others like Bike and Fitness, Momentum is Your Friend and Run Labs to name a few, combined usage fees from skills clinics and events certainly contribute to the constant work mountain bike trails require.

Beyond just keeping the trails in shape, English and Bike and Fitness owners Damian and Jenny Enderby teach their clients about respect and adoration for the places they ride. But even within this community of riders, there are disagreements about how best to keep the park healthy and thriving. But the overarching push to keep Glenrock thriving.

Enderby has been riding at Glenrock since the 90s and is quick to point to the community effort that’s kept the place available to different types of users.

“Mick Plummer has done heaps and heaps of work for it. He’s done a lot of work. It’s a slow process from what I understand getting things approved to make things happen. But the fact he’s been doing it so long is pretty impressive. I think especially with all the politics that he’s up against. Without guys like that, it wouldn’t be what it is,” Enderby said.

A number of the people we spoke with wished people respected the trails more, and better understood how their activities impact the environment. There are stories of people pooping at the gate, bringing dogs into the park, or grown adults cutting erosion-causing lines around obstacles you can teach an eight-year-old to ride.

Anderson would love to see more acknowledgement of the local land and the traditional custodians, with culturally appropriate signage.

“Even some places you go where you can press a button, and it speaks to you in language and speaks to you in English.” She was riding through Parramatta recently and had seen something like this done really beautifully there.

More information about the cultural significance and local indigenous people is what Rowland wants to see too. “There are so many artifacts in there, it’s ridiculous. And just the history.”

Rowland and his crew actually discovered an artifact while they were building the Pump Action trail. Rather than disturb the artifact the decision was made to put in a boardwalk to protect it.

Collective efforts to educate other riders about how to care for the trails, and the history of the land they pass through, point to the important role of skills coaches, seasoned riders and other local businesses helping riders new to the sport understand basic etiquette and what’s at stake if it’s ignored.

Grassroots Efforts | Community Leadership in Trail Stewardship

Drift Bikes is another local business that plays a huge role in educating riders about their local trails. Glenrock is part of the heart and soul of the shop, which opened in 2003. Owner Robbie McNaughton said they originally wanted a retail premise to sell mountain bike videos.

“We were very grassroots,” said McNaughton. “We would have a set ride at Glenrock every single Saturday. It would usually finish at my parents’ house. Mum would cook the remaining people breakfast, and we’d all just sit on the lawn.”

Drift Bikes now has two retail locations, a workshop and employs 25 staff. The three premises combined cover a whopping floorspace of almost 2,000 square metres and the workshop is so busy that riders will sometimes wait weeks to book their bikes in for a repair. While VHS sales have passed their peak, Drift sells about 10,000 bikes a year.

The shop’s proximity to the trails is what brings people in the door. “Our last advertisement for Drift Bikes was on a bus in 2005,” said McNaughton.

Drift has worked hard to make it as easy as possible for someone to ride a bike from the shop to Glenrock and vice versa, safely.

“It’s just having that access for people to come in and go, ‘This just happened on my bike. What do I do?’ Or, ‘I’m having trouble with this and what can I do?’ We can’t answer every question, but there’s a pretty good chance of us being able to help the riding community by being that close,” said McNaughton.

This also means educating riders about the damage done if they ride in the wet, and cancelling hire bike bookings if it’s in the best interest of the trails.

The quality of the Glenrock trails and the beauty of the location are a point of pride for McNaughton, who loves seeing the reaction of pro riders when they come to Newcastle as much as he loves seeing 100 people of all ages turning up to a shop social ride with someone like Sam Hill, Troy Brosnan or the Steve Peat and the Santa Cruz Syndicate.

The shop has supported trail building days, tree planting days and made financial contributions to the Glenrock Trail Alliance among other activities but they are only permitted to do so much. McNaughton is a proponent of improving the services at Glenrock, but like many who’ve dedicated their lives to the sport, he’s learned to save his energy for where it makes a palpable difference.

“I went to council meetings 20 years ago about Glenrock and about getting formalisation, and I got so frustrated,” he said, speaking about all the red tape that gets in the way of multiple avenues people in the community have tried to keep moving forward.

“Look at what the Hunter Mountain Bike Association’s created at Awaba,” said McNaughton about other activities that have happened in the meantime. A new pump, jump and dual slalom track has just opened at Awaba, with recent trail building at the park funded by a $25,000 grant and an additional $60,000 the club has raised over time. “Glenrock still doesn’t have a bubbler,” McNaughton said.

“I’m reserving my passion for when I can actually do something of benefit,” said McNaughton. “I’ve been to a fair few meetings. I’ve got behind what I can. But I think my strong suit with our business is we have access to 15,000 plus people on our mailing list that could all benefit from something to do with Glenrock. That’s where we can really push for funding and push for fundraisers and raise money and make stuff happen.”

McNaughton supports preservation over reinvention. His biggest fear is the trails becoming so manicured there’s not a rock or tree root in sight. While the Mountain Bike Plan focuses on trails within the park, McNaughton would love to see the area keep serving the Newcastle community more broadly.

 “Someone with nothing can go there and have as good a day as anyone. And it’s so easy to develop in a green sense. I don’t mean go and put eco villages in there. I mean build green corridors, build access, build as much walking trails, mountain bike trails as we possibly can to just make the whole city benefit,” he said.

“We can rebuild hockey stadiums, we can add wings onto football stadiums, but that still only touches a tiny percentage. Glenrock has that ability to touch everyone,” he said.

Like many in the community, McNaughton sees the huge potential for Glenrock. He also understands what a delicate thing it is to manage the place in a way that preserves it for future generations and saves it from being over-loved in the shorter term.

“It’s so much better off being managed with a plan than just trying to be defended,” he said. “Defence just doesn’t work in this instance because there’s just too great a demand for it. It’s far better off showing people the way than just letting people have their way.”

Finding Balance | Conservation and Recreation in Glenrock

The NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service rangers are the people on the ground, literally, finding ways to balance the hopes, needs and behaviours of the million or so people who pass through Glenrock each year. Catching up with local Ranger Ashley Deveridge and Lower Hunter Area Manager Mitch Carter added a healthy dose of perspective to what it means to balance differing dreams and expectations for the future of Glenrock with long-term conservation.

Before we’d even got past the hi-hellos Deveridge and Carter were excitedly telling us about the new gate at the Gun Club Road trailhead that allows riders on adaptive bikes to access the park.

“What started as a $2,500 gate became five kilometres plus of adaptable trails,” Deveridge said, visibly stoked.

Local rider Chris Apps asked about the gate so he could access the trails on his adaptive bike. Apps worked with Momentum is Your Friend coach and adaptive rider Colleen Kehoe, the rangers and trail builders to make some of the trails in the park adaptive-friendly, while keeping them fun and challenging for adaptive bikes and two-wheeled bikes. Snakes and Ladders, a winding climbing trail, just needed one rock removed, but it was a big one!

“That’s empowered them to be able to use this park on their own. Not with a friend, not with help — on their own,” said Deveridge, who grew up just metres from the park. “I’ve had rangers ring me from all over the place and ask about how we designed the gate and what we did because there was no standard design for it.”

For the Plan of Management and Draft Mountain Bike Plan, asking this duo why it has taken so long to be signed off is a bit like losing your mind when someone shows up to service your air-con during a heatwave. It’s not their fault that something’s not working. They just happen to be in the firing line, despite being one of your best allies in trying to manage a situation that’s far from ideal.

“There are 890 reserves in New South Wales. So there are a lot of Plans of Management to do. And they’re not something to just jump into lightly. They’re something that have to be reflective of the million people that visit here a year. And you can’t be all things for everyone,” said Carter.

“The Minister takes that really seriously. Is it right? Is it fit for purpose?

“We’ve got a well-considered plan that’s been prepared, and it takes time to work through the process,” he said.

Some of the delays have been due to the plans being drafted in a previous government. It took the new Minister, Penny Sharpe, some time to get up to speed — while also being responsible for the energy sector and climate change initiatives. Carter tells us they’ve been fielding questions and advocating locally.

In theory, the new Plan of Management needs to last for 10 years. In reality, it needs to last for about 20. Mountain biking was almost a different sport a decade ago. E-MTBs and adaptive bikes weren’t a common feature on the trails 10 years ago but they are two examples of new technology that is having a significant impact on trail building, rider numbers, and the way folks are using the trails.

Formalising strategic documents that guide what happens in Glenrock for so long is not something to jump into lightly. This is part of the reason the Mountain Bike Plan sits alongside the Plan of Management as a reference document, rather than something spelt out within it.

“We are trying to balance conservation with recreation. That’s our primary objective, which is why we can’t be probably what a lot of people want us to be,” said Carter.

“We try and do a good job of striking that balance because conservation comes first, but at the same time I’d argue we’re doing a lot of really progressive things here and are on the cutting edge of not having people view mountain biking and conservation as diametrically opposed to things.”

While the riding community wishes change was faster, Carter emphasised that things certainly haven’t been stagnant while the current plans have been navigating the approval process. There’s maintenance and management; there’s rehabilitation, there are gates, there’s a new wet-weather signage system in development, there’s back-burning, there’s talking to the man who came up to us asking whether it was OK to put a shade tent up for his son’s birthday party, there’s answering questions from people who want to know if they can go walking somewhere without any chance of snakes, and so much more.

As Rowland said, the local rangers are doing the work of about 100 people. And, in a notable shift from the 90s, they see Glenrock as a national success story for how mountain biking and conservation can happen together.

“We’ve been heavily focused in the last five years on getting what’s already there in better condition than what it has been for many years. I think anyone in the community would acknowledge there’s been a significant investment,” Carter said.

He estimates that over half a million to a million dollars had been spent improving the existing mountain bike network in anticipation of the new plan. The goal is to make a sustainable network of trails and a park that is here forever.

Carter is as quick as anyone to acknowledge the complexity of managing a place like Glenrock. The task of managing the hopes and expectations of mountain bikers and so many other user groups is tricky, but this has been absolutely central to what makes Glenrock so important to the community as a whole.

“It can be an uneasy marriage at times, and you can have your falling outs and your disagreements, but you keep coming back to the table in the best interests of the park and what it’s going to look like in the future. If everybody just goes to their own dung heap, it’s going to be a bad outcome for everyone,” said Carter.

Looking Ahead | The Future of Glenrock and Its Riders

As we listened to people talk about Glenrock, we kept hearing stories that resonated with so many other trail networks in Australia, stories that defy any contemporary journalistic effort to shrink them down into a 12-second social media video with a three-word caption. Stories about where we ride, why we ride, and what people will do to keep those experiences, and the places that surround them, alive.

Folks around Glenrock may have differing views on certain aspects of the future of the park, but the community is practically vibrating with energy and goodwill to find ways to take care of the area — if only there were more concrete avenues for directing that passion.

English half-joked about wanting to buy a house right at the trailhead, charging a gold coin donation to use the tap, and running a canteen – even if it just sold lollies because no one was available to staff it.

“I know I’ve got so many volunteers that would be keen as to help out with doing trail maintenance if that ever does get up somehow,” English said more seriously.

We hope that with the Plan of Management approved and the Mountain Bike Plan on the way, the energy from the community can once again be channelled for the greater good. Having dug into what’s been happening in the meantime, we have to agree with Carter that things certainly haven’t been standing still.

Managing a place like this is an incredibly complex situation, but the more different types of people can educate each other, and work together within a difficult system, the more chance these delightfully old-school trails will be there for generations to come. A story true of just about every organically developed mountain bike destination in Australia. And a story that wouldn’t be possible without the work of so many volunteers and riders-come-business-folk who continue to go out of their way to make the sport all that it is.