E-MTB in Victoria’s High Country | The Best Way to Do It

With two Epic Trails, multiple gravity parks and seemingly endless trail riding, Victoria’s High Country is a veritable playground. From open alpine ridges to pine forest gnar and adventures that stumble upon artefacts and infrastructure of a time long gone, there is so much ground to cover and diversity in the terrain.

This is where an e-MTB truly shines – not just for those whose legs aren’t as springy as they once were, but also for new and less experienced riders keen to explore deeper into this stunning landscape.

Come along as Eli and Vandy ride Mount Buller’s Stonefly and give us their top e-MTB tips

 

electric mountain bike
e-MTBs open up so much terrain in Victoria’s High Country, and help you to extract the maximum amount of riding out of a trip of any length.

Lowering the bar of entry to the backcountry

There was a time when riding Stonefly from the Mount Buller Village was an all-day affair. The black-rated adventure loop is a masterpiece of technical climbing that challenges your lungs and legs as much as your brain. It also takes in some truly amazing bits of subalpine scenery as you meander towards the summit of Mount Stirling and the Bluff Spur Memorial Hut.

With an extra 250 watts behind you to help you over some of those tricky square edges on Stonefly, that 6km climb requires far fewer matches to earn the downright dreamy descent at the end.

Even with an e-MTB, Stonefly probably isn’t a trail that we’d take a true beginner on. Still, for more intermediate and advanced riders, it means you can bang out a big backcountry loop in the morning and not be totally shelled for an afternoon cutting laps of ABOM and Copperhead.

For those new and beginner riders, an e-MTB can help them experience areas of the High Country that they otherwise wouldn’t have had the legs to get out there and back.

For most of us, a trip to Buller, Falls Creek, Bright, Mount Beauty or any other destination is for a weekend, three days or maybe a week if you can scrounge up enough annual leave. With that limited time to explore these places, the value of an e-MTB is that it allows you to experience more of the place or to sneak in more laps of a trail you love.

Even with the extra range, you can achieve with an e-MTB, that doesn’t give you a licence to throw caution to the wind, wang it in turbo mode and pedal until you get in over your head.

Buller e-MTB
Put simply, an e-MTB allows you to cover so much more terrain and opens up amazing places like this to more people. But that doesn’t mean you can be irresponsible and throw caution to the wind.

Benchmarking your capability| Don’t burn all your matches at the start

While the first hour on an e-MTB can make you feel invincible, after four or five hours of riding, even the fittest riders will feel the effects.

You can still work bloody hard on an e-MTB; full gas is full gas, regardless of the ride — on a e-MTB, you just go faster. For more leisurely riding, we like to equate the effort of an e-MTB ride vs. your naturally aspirated bike to the difference between jogging and running. You can jog all day and probably talk the whole way through as you tick the kilometres away, where as properly running will leave you more breathless and requires a bit more enegery and focus.

While that extra power at the cranks will help to flatten out hills and the extra oomph will make features that take a three-second 10/10 effort to clean on your pedal bike, something closer to a six or seven on the e-MTB, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Buller e-mtb
Easy tiger! Work your way up to longer rides and more difficult maneuvers, and keep a little bit of gas in the tank for the end of your ride.

Don’t forget that e-MTB’s often weigh around 20kg, and muscling all that weight up and over something does require power from your core and upper body that riding an analogue bike doesn’t stress to the same degree. Even dropping the anchors to slow down for a corner and tipping the bike in works the muscles in your trunk to a different degree than your normal bike. You may not notice it after 45 minutes, but 40km into that ride, your hands, forearms, and traps will be well aware.

Especially if you’ve never ridden an e-MTB before, it’s easy to get carried away at the start of a ride and pay for it on the tail end.

So take it easy, Tiger, we’re going to be out here all day. Temper your efforts and keep some of your supply of beans in reserve to get you through the day.

Electric mountain bike
Slackcountry is a skiing term, but it’s equally as relevant to using e-MTBs in the high country. Don’t fall into heuristic traps, and make sure you’re prepared.

Don’t fall victim to the Slackcountry

In skiing and snowboarding, slack country is a term used to describe backcountry terrain that is just outside the resort and can sometimes even be lapped using the chairlift. It’s easy to access, often through a designated gate or by ducking a rope — which we don’t condone— and can sometimes have amazing turns in steep terrain that would otherwise require a looooooong walk to find.

However, people regularly die in avalanches in the slack country. Sometimes these folks are highly experienced backcountry travellers that know better, and it occasionally happens so close to the resort you can see it from the chairlift. The convenience of the slack country leads folks to make poor decisions and — knowing or not — venture into avalanche terrain without beacons, probes or shovels, nor the knowledge of how to use them.

Buller e-mtb
An extra 250 watts can make you feel pretty darn invincible as you charge further away from civilization. But are you prepared for a snapped chain or bad weather?

E-MTB can offer a similar heuristic trap. You can get pretty far out there on an 800Wh battery — are you prepared for bad weather? Do you have enough food and water? Can you manage and repair a puncture? What about a snapped chain? Are you going to get back before it gets dark?

The allure of the views and epic places around the Victorian High Country is strong. It’s unlikely you’ll be buried in an avalanche halfway up the Stonefly climb in December, it’s still a hike to get back to the Village from there. The same goes for rides like the Alpine Epic, Indigo Epic, Cascades at Lake Mountain or even something more extreme like Fainters Track.

Being prepared is the name of the game, so don’t go out there with one bottle of plain water and no phone. Make sure you have enough to fuel your ride, a way to navigate and don’t forget to grab your jacket — trust us.

Buller e-mtb
You can still work bloody hard on an e-MTB and you need to properly fuel your effort. Don’t skimp on the snacks!

If you’re unsure about what you might need to consider heading out to vistas far away in the Victorian High Country — or anywhere else for that matter — check out our comprehensive guide on bush safety for mountain bikers.

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How far will a fully charged battery get you?

When you read reviews of e-MTBs or even go into a shop to hire a pedal-assisted steed, you will encounter a lot of jargon, like watt hours, peak torque, adaptive assist modes, and full power vs. SL.

For the uninitiated you may as well be speaking ancient Sumerian and even standing in a shop trying to rent an e-MTB, the person trying to run you through what all the levers and buttons on your bike do is going to cover a lot.

The main concern of folks new to e-MTBs is range. How far can you go on a full charge? Unfortunately, the answer depends, and there are a host of caveats.

Buller e-mtb
Unfortunately, the range question is far from a simple one, and there are so many caveats as to how far you can get on a single charge.

Our own range testing of e-MTBs demonstrates just that. We run this test in as controlled an environment as possible, while also not being inside a lab. It’s the same 65kg rider, on the same paved climb, in boost mode, doing laps until he runs out of juice.

This list is an amalgamation of different styles of e-MTBs, motor systems, and battery sizes. You’ll notice the results are recorded in metres climbed, not kilometres travelled. While rider weight and bike weight will both affect how much charge you can get out of an e-MTB, altitude gain is arguably the most significant outside factor that can affect the range you’ll get.

mount buller
We’ve done a fair amount of range testing, but even with our data, there are caveats. Don’t take these figures as like-for-like as to how much elevation you can cover. However, it can be used as a very rough benchmark to compare against your planned ride, taking into account your own rider weight.

If range anxiety is on your mind, plan out your route on something like Trailforks, Strava, Ride With GPS or Komoot and note the elevation gain. If you’re riding one of the bikes on our list, you can benchmark the elevation gain of your ride and rider weight in comparison to what’s on our list — keeping in mind that this test is done at the highest, most battery-hungry assist mode, on a paved climb. It is far from an exact science, but it should provide a very rough benchmark of the level of range anxiety you should have.

For a bit more perspective, a fit rider might tap out 25km with 500-700m of climbing in around two hours.

On a e-MTB that same rider might hit 40km with 800-1000m of climbing in about the same amount of time using an adaptive trail mode.

The hills in the High Country are not small, and having that extra help, especially for newer and less fit riders, simply allows them to experience more of what makes it such a great place to ride!

Flow’s Top High Country e-MTB adventures

Lake Mountain
Cascades at Lake Mountain is a solid candidate for an e-MTB adventure. Despite being mostly descending the 500m of climbing is not to be underestimated.

Cascades | Lake Mountain

Cascades at Lake Mountain is one of our favourite rides in all of Australia. Starting from the summit — shuttles from Marysville run through the summer months — this adventure trail is a bag of fun.

At 28km in length it packs in 1,550m of descending, but that’s tempered with 500m of climbing. At face value, it might not seem like that big a day out, but trust us when we say it’s not a ride to be underestimated and is a great candidate for an e-MTB.

The crew at Lake Mountain is constantly tweaking and improving the trail, and it has a bit of everything. Chunky rock gardens, big flowy berms and boosty jumps. The scenery changes as you descend, and it’s well and truly not one to be missed.

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Mount buller
Stonefly at Mount Buller is a big ride on a pedal bike, and an e-MTB makes it significantly more accessible.

Stonefly | Mount Buller

We’ve already given you a bit of an intro to Stonefly — remember the masterpieces of climbing followed by a dreamy descent. What we didn’t tell you is how to get there.

From the Village, you’ll have to ride out via Gang Gangs and Corn Hill. Hop over onto Trigger Happy, this was once a climb, but in recent years has become a descent and it’s a BANGER. That will have you at the start and finish of Stonefly — you’ll want to ride it clockwise, so hang a left.

After the 10km loop you’ll be right back where you started. Head down Woolybutt back towards civilisation. Here you can either veer off onto the Delatite River Trail or return to Buller Village.

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Mount Buller
The Alpine Epic was the first IMBA Epic trail in Australia and it well and truly lives up to the name. At 40km long it’s a big day out on any mountain bike. Again an e-MTB just makes it that bit more accessible.

The Alpine Epic | Mount Buller

A paragon of adventure riding, the The Alpine Epic is the first IMBA Epic trail in Australia, and this 46km journey from Buller Village to Mirrambah well and truly lives up to the name.

From the village you’ll head out just the same as you did to Stonefly and work your way up the climb. But instead of starting the descent at the Bluff Spur Memorial Hut, hang a left and start the adventure. Expect epic landscapes and changing alpine and subalpine scenery until you get to a log with Enjoy carved into it. This marks the start of a magnificent bermy 6km descent. The trail finishes up with a beautiful rolling singletrack along the banks of the Delatite river.

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Indigo Epic
The Indigo Epic is a helix shaped trail connecting Beechworth and Yackandandah. It can be divided up in a bunch of different ways depending on how big a ride you’re after.

The Indigo Epic | Beechworth

Connecting Beechworth to Yackandandah, the Indigo Epic is a helix of 56km of singletrack that plugs into the Yack Tracks and Beechworth Mountain Bike Park. The beauty of this trail is that it can be ridden a number of different ways. Start in Yack, and you can ride to Beechworth for 36km of dreamy singletrack goodness or a 40km loop starting and finishing in Yackandandah that takes in the show-stopping Homeward Bound descent.

If you’re in for a really big day there is the 56km Yack to Yack loop that goes all the way to Beechworth and back. If you plan to embark on this one on an e-MTB careful battery management will be required.

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Falls Creek
While the terrain outside of the Falls Creek bike park isn’t technical, there is still a lot of ground to cover, and the hills aren’t exactly smaller either.

Aqueduct to Cope and Wallace Hut | Falls Creek

While it can be difficult to pull yourself away from the bike park at Falls Creek there is so much adventure to be had up in them thar hills.

Follow the Aqueduct Trail out of the park and pedal around the Rocky Valley Storage to the Langford Aqueduct for a loop out to Wallace Hut and Cope Hut.

These historic cattlemen’s huts are like a time machine to an era long past, and along the way, you’ll be greeted by 360 views across the Bogong High Plain. It’s all fire road pedalling on this ride, so don’t go in expecting beautifully manicured bermed corners and techy rock features — that’s what the bike park is for — but pedalling through this landscape is well pretty special.

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Mystic bike park bright
While most folks shuttle at Mystic, there are plenty of climbing trails to get you up to the top. An e-MTB allows you to get more laps without having to pack into the back of a troop like sardines.

Bulk laps | Mystic Bike Park

While we do love a day of shuttles at Mystic, you don’t need them to enjoy the park — especially if you have an e-MTB.

There are a few ways to climb up to the top of the park and get to the downhill runs you want to come back down. With 450m of vertical, under your own steam, two top-to-bottom laps are going to be a big one, but chuck that e-MTB into turbo mode, and you’ll be dreaming — keeping in mind that you don’t have to climb all the way to the top of the park every time.

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