Flow Mountain Bike acknowledges the Traditional Owners of Tumbuarumba and the surrounding area, the people of Wiradjuri and Walgalu Country. We recognise their connection to lands, waters and communities and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.
How many trail networks in Australia have held a cattle auction to fundraise so that land could be purchased to build trails? For the new network in Tumbarumba, that is the reality, with the local club Cycle Tumbaruma hosting the Udderly Fantastic Fundraising Auction to do just that.
This new trail network on Mt Tumbarumba is a grassroots effort entirely realised by the hard work of the local community. With Blue Sky Trails managing the project, Natural Trails, Iconic Trails, and TRC Trails have been hard at work cutting singletrack over the past year, with the opening celebration on March 29 and the trails open to the public from March 31.
With plenty of granite and 300m of elevation to play with, we caught up with Peter Marshall from Cycle Tumbarumba and Construction Manager Craig Stonestreet of Natural Trails to get the story behind this trail network and a sneak peek of what you can expect.
Related:
- Trails Of The Tropics | Exploring brand new trails in Finch Hatton, QLD
- How To Do The South Coast | Flow’s guide to road tripping Mogo, Narooma and Eden
- First Turkey’s Future | Rockhampton MTB Club’s Bold Plans for QLD
It all started in Rotorua
Peter Marshall and his wife moved back to Tumbarumba for a scene change after living in Canberra in 2015. Before Derby became the behemoth it is and started the tidal wave of mountain bike destinations in Australia, the pair had been to Rotorua a few times and were left scratching their heads as to why there wasn’t something of that scale on this side of the Tasman Sea.
“Tumbarumba is surrounded by state forests and great terrain — just no trails. We came back with ideas about growing cycle tourism and spent several years trying to negotiate with Forestry New South Wales to access an area of land I’d always had my eye on about 6km out of town,” says Marshall.
This patch was steep and covered in the wrong species of trees, so it was unlikely ever to be logged. However, despite making their case to Forestry, the state-run logging company ultimately said no.
Today, Tumbarumba is not totally without singletrack and the local club is about 50 members strong. Established in 2016 around that same time, Cycle Tumbarumba secured access to what’s called Police Paddock, the Town Common and Mason’s Hill.
“We have done everything either with grants, fundraising or just volunteer — get out and do it — and we have MOUs with the landholders being Forestry NSW Softwoods and then the Council,” says Marshall.
We came up with the idea that we could get a donation of a PTIC — Pregnancy Tested in Calf — otherwise known as a cow.
The Udderly Fantastic Fundraiser
Even though Forestry had pumped the brakes on Marshall’s dream site, he hadn’t given up on trying to bring mountain bikers to Tumba.
Mount Tumbarumba sits on the opposite side of town from the Mason’s Hill trail network. With tonnes of vertical drop and even more granite, it was a bit of a pipe dream, as Marshall had been told it was on a family property and they’d never sell.
But timing is everything, and an inquiry at the right moment saw the landowner ready to sell a patch. After an unsuccessful attempt at grant funding from the Bushfire Local Economic Recovery Fund — which is what filled the coffers to make Narooma and Eden happen — Cycle Tumbaruma set its sights on the bigger, federally funded Black Summer Bushfire Recovery Grants.
Related:
“We went bigger and did a lot more work,” he says. “We funded our own Economic Impact Assessment and put in heaps to be ready for the next round (of grant funding) the next summer,” says Marshall.
They were successful in that grant, bringing in nearly $3.4 million AUD to fund the project. However, one of the stipulations was that that money could not be used to purchase land — unlike the Bushfire Local Economic Recovery Fund.
So they put their fundraising hats on and got to work. The Tumbarumba Community Bank awarded the club a $100,000 AUD grant, and the club also received a $50,000 AUD grant from the Hyne Timber Mill’s Community Trust. The club was also able to use a deductible gift recipient status account to run a cash donation drive through the Tumut Community Foundation.
All of this got Cycle Tumbarumba well on its way to hitting the sum needed to purchase the land for the trail network, but they weren’t quite there.
While the Timber Mill is the largest employer in Tumba, Marshall says the area is God’s country for cattle.
“One of our committee members is a cattleman and a grazier. At that time, cattle prices were at a record high. We came up with the idea that we could get a donation of a PTIC — Pregnancy Tested in Calf — otherwise known as a cow. He sort of drove that, and we had 17 farmers donate,” says Marshall.
Beyond just livestock, things like leather wares, stays at ski lodges, and locally made wine and gin were all auctioned off. In total, between the auction and donations, Cycle Tumbarumba raised a little over $141,000 AUD — with about $80,000 AUD of that coming from the cattle.
“Of those 17 farmers, probably only three will ever ride the trails. Tumbarumba is quite isolated, and it’s always sort of been a stand-on-your-own-two-feet community, but they could see the value and that it was worth supporting (this project) if we want a viable economy and the town to grow,” says Marshall.
Tumbarumba Rail Trail
In April 2020, the first rail trail in NSW opened from Tumbarumba to Rosewood. Launching a major tourism product just as a global pandemic took hold was probably not what anyone was looking for, but with the uptake of bikes through COVID, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
“In regional New South Wales, we had very few lockdowns compared to Melbourne and Sydney, and so people were able to travel. It (the Rail Trail) was really busy with tourists, and all of a sudden, all of the cars in town had bikes on them,” says Marshall.
With the Rail Trail preceding the major push for the mountain bike trail network, it served as a litmus test and showed the town folk that, yes, people will indeed travel from far and wide to ride their bikes.
“The Rail Trail in Tumbarumba was the first in NSW on a state-owned corridor, and that was an 18-year-long effort. The farmers along the line were generally pretty anti rail trail. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think of the 14 farmers, 11 were against the plan,” he says. “But then, after seeing what it did for the town, they are on board. It sort of kept the town afloat through COVID and ongoing visitation.”
While there may only be 50 mountain bikers in a population of about 1,800 according to the last census, Marshall says he spends a lot of time in the supermarket answering people’s questions about where the trail network is up to because the locals are excited about it.
There’s a couple of amazing big, huge rock slabs. One has got to be well over 100m long.
What about the trails in Tumbarumba? | Ride Mt Tumbarumba
If you look at the initial grant award, you’ll see that the Mount Tumbarumba Adventure Park was slated for 50km of mountain bike trails, 10km of shared-use trails, and 5km of hiking trails.
As Craig Stonestreet from Natural Trails explains, initially, the trail network was based in the private block, but they also secured access into some of the surrounding blocks with the land managers on board. As time passed, things changed, and that access was no longer available, so the project had to pivot to stay within the borders of the private block.
As it turned out, this was just the start of an uphill battle. In the early stages, the Snowy Valleys Council advised that the singletrack would not need a Development Application as those are reserved for infrastructure — that turned out to be bad advice. Despite a boatload of lobbying the trails for the Mt Tumbarumba Mountain Bike Park had to be included in the DA.
“It also wasn’t on our radar at all that we’d get caught up in the biodiversity offset legislation because it’s a private(ly funded) project on private land. If it were on public land — crown, council, forestry or whatever — you wouldn’t have to pay for all of the same ecological surveys for a low-impact trail network,” he says.
At that point in time, they had planned 38km of trails, which required about $90,000 AUD in ecological surveys, and potentially up to $8.5 million AUD in offset liabilities. That is, unless they were to spend a whole bunch more money to conduct more surveys to rule out the presence of sensitive flora and fauna species, still leaving $4-million AUD in offset liabilities.
The solution was to reduce the total kilometrage for this first stage of the build to 22 trails, totalling a bit over 30km, to bring it all under a threshold for veg clearing. About $100,000 AUD later the trails could go ahead! Even still, Marshall tells Flow that biodiversity offsets and surveys have cost $250,000 AUD more than they’d initially budgeted.
Sooo much granite on Mt Tumbrumba
Stonestreet was on site when we spoke to him, and within about 50m of where he was standing, he gave us a sneak preview of several massive slabs and giant round granite boulders.
“There’s a couple of amazing big, huge rock slabs. One has got to be well over 100m long,” he says. “And there’s some nice bits that don’t have granite, and when you get the rocks out of it, there are some amazing bits of dirt.”
The overall design for Tumbarumba is a gravity-based network using shuttle uplift, though there is also a climbing trail to the top.
“Each trail will be quite different and unique. Even though there’s only 20 or so, I’ve tried to set them up as totally different experiences for each one. From the top, you’ll be able to link trails together for a 4km+ descent back to the trailhead,” he says.
With the trailhead about 2.5km from the centre of town, the network spans across Mt Tumbarumba. It takes in two peaks with a saddle in between them with trails across four or five aspects, and there will be everything from jump flow lines to janky black and double blacks.
Stonestreet also made a point that adaptive riders have been considered in this network, and the trails will be built to offer an achievable challenge so they can develop their skills.
“I wanted to create something that allowed them to push to that next level, that will challenge adaptive riders, but not inhibit them,” he says.
Despite Cycle Tumbaruma being a landowner, Marshall stressed that the trail network is a community asset, and they’re not looking to lock people out. With that, they are also working to flesh out and formalise some of the hiking trails that have existed on Mt Tumbarumba for some time. In this first stage, they completed a 7.4km loop called Sounding Ground and are looking to add more down the line.
“There is a local guy here that runs a group for school kids training to trek the Kokoda track,” says Stonestreet. “They’ve sort of used this land to train the kids for years before it was owned by the Club, so we’re fixing up some of the existing stuff to formalise a hiking loop,” he says.
“This was important to us because it widens the people we cater for, and for the first time, the public are able to walk to the top of what is a pretty significant landmark right on the edge of town to enjoy the views, landscapes and have that connection with Nature. We have Gang Gangs, Lyrebirds, and plenty of wildlife,” says Marshall.
Getting to this stage, the project has faced all manner of delays, all with the deadlines imposed by the grant funds looming. And so to bang out the network double time — well, actually triple time — Natural Trails, Iconic Trails, and TRC Trails all worked to get the project built.
It’s definitely a little unorthodox to have three separate trail companies working on a single trail network at once, however the unintended benefit is that each builder has its signature style. Having three working all at once adds that extra diversity to the network.
Mt Tumbarumba Memberships
From the get-go, the trail network at Mt Tumbarumba will be based around the membership model, just like Mystic and also the small private network on the Tasman Peninsula near Taranna.
There are a number of factors that play into the decision, the largest being that Cycle Tumbaruma is the land owner, and with that, the network needs to operate without ongoing funding from the council or other government entities.
“Unlike many public trail networks on government land, this facility is on private land owned by the club, which was entirely funded and is now maintained by the local community.
Owning the land comes with additional costs and responsibilities, including rates, public liability insurance, weed management and fees, which we wouldn’t otherwise incur,” Marshall says.
The memberships are run through the Hivepass App. Day access starts at $15 AUD, and annual and family memberships are available.
He tells Flow the goal here is to keep Mt Tumba safe and sustainable while also fostering a great riding experience in the park.
Best of all, Mt Tumbarumba opens this weekend, with a celebration on March 29, and the trails officially welcoming the public from March 31!
Editorial Guidelines
At Flow Mountain Bike, we’re committed to delivering engaging and trustworthy content, from product reviews to destination showcases, news, interviews, and features. While many of the brands and destinations we cover may advertise with us, our editorial team operates independently, ensuring our content is guided by expertise and passion—not commercial influence. Sponsored content is always clearly disclosed, and we remain dedicated to providing honest and unbiased coverage across everything we publish. For more details, see our Transparency Report.