Ride the Valley of the Giants | Walpole invites mountain bikers to pedal among the tingle trees

Flow Mountain Bike acknowledges the Traditional Owners, the Murrum of the Minang peoples of the larger Noongar Nation, who are the original custodians of Walpole and the surrounding area. We recognise their connection to lands, waters and communities and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.

By his recollection, David Wilcox says that when Common Ground Trails was engaged to do the business case for trail projects in Southwest WA, the idea for the trails in Walpole came from a DVD produced by Flow’s own Chris Southwood in 2006 — when he was an editor at Australian Mountain Bike Magazine — riding the Motu Trails in New Zealand.

“We went over and did the Wakamarina Track and some of those other (New Zealand Great Rides) tracks based on the trip Chris Southwood did back then. I built this love for these big adventure rides and had always wanted to do something like that here — I’ve been trying for 20 years now,” says Wilcox.

Taking cues from rides like the Timber Trail and Old Ghost Road in New Zealand, where the landscape, and the experience of riding through it, not the berms, doubles or slabby rock rolls, are what dominate the adventure was the aim of what the project in Walpole is seeking to achieve.

“It’s a really iconic landscape along the Frankland River. You’re talking about some of the biggest trees in the world — the tingle trees only grow here and are absolutely towering — right next to these beautiful waterfalls. It’s quite an incised landscape, so it’s about 200-plus-metres of vertical, most of it this big deep cut, exposed granite outcrops through the valley. It’s just an idyllic place for mountain biking,” he says.

After fellow WA Trail Builders Magic Dirt Trailworx realigned a section of the Munda Biddi Track running through Walpole, it provided a style guide as to what could go in here, the WA Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions kicked off the Valley of the Giant’s Adventure Trails.

Currently under construction in South West, WA, with between 40km and 65km of singletrack to be ready by early 2025, this trail network is a little different from what you’ll find elsewhere in the state.

We caught up with the folks from WA Parks and Wildlife behind the project and the builders on the ground to find out more about what’s happening in Walpole.

Walpole’s magic magnetism

As Rod Annear, Assistant Director of the Parks and Visitor Services Division at WA Parks and Wildlife, tells us there’s not really any way to get anywhere in Southwest WA other than to drive through Walpole. And at this convergence of the one main highway, it’s a bit of an oddity for the state in more ways than one.

At the turn of the century, it was home to Frank Skinner Thompson, a pioneer of the region and a philosopher who fled to Walpole — by way of Fremantle — from the UK in 1910, fearing Russia had evidence he was behind the development of anti-government propaganda. He also happened to be best buds with Leo Tolstoy.

Walpole was also home to Pierre Bellanger, junior counsel in the second trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus of the ‘Dreyfus Affair,’ who was falsely convicted of treason. This scandal shook the foundations of French politics, religion, and national identity and divided the country. It remains one of the most stark examples of antisemitism and a miscarriage of justice in modern history.

Beyond the confluence of individuals who played roles in shaping things you learned about in a high school history class, it’s also one of the few places in Western Australia that is wet and sees an average high temperature under 25ºC during the summer.

“It’s really one of the very few high rainfall areas in Western Australia, and that’s the reason why the red tingle trees grow here — they only grow within about 40km of Walpole,” Annear says. “These forests are a relic of a really distant past forest that would have grown more throughout the Southwest a long time ago.”

And it’s these trees that are the star of the Valley of the Giants trail network. Eucalyptus Jacksonii, commonly known as the red tingle, grows to a height of about 50 metres and can have a circumference of up to 25 metres!

“In the old days, there were photos of people with their cars parked inside them,” says John Dingey from Magic Dirt Trailworx, which is also building on the project.

Walpole had a timber mill at one point, which, in addition to farming, is what the town was built upon. While there is still farming in the area, it’s surrounded by Walpole-Nornalup National Park, and the town also sits on the Nornalup Inlet. So when the mill shut down, as so many other places with natural wonders on their doorstep do, the local economy pivoted to tourism.

“Once upon a time not that long ago, when you drove down before eight or after five, all the street lights were out,” says Clint Hull, Assistant Capital Works Coordinator Parks & Visitor Services Division at WA Parks, who also happens to be a Walpole local.

“It had a bit of blossoming in tourism through the 90s when the tree top walk was built, there was a reasonably big investment in accommodation, and there were a bunch of restaurants that went in too. It’s probably had a bit of a tailing off, and things have plateaued. It’s a bit quieter in town at the moment, and I think it was ready for a timely new injection,” continues Annear.

With the Munda Biddi already running through Walpole, the local community is aware of bikes and mountain bikers. A large portion of the visitors coming through are there for the water, and it’s a hotspot for grey nomads. The town itself has a pub and plenty of quirky artisans and quaint cafes.

The trails here take this into account, along with the fragility of the area, and Parks make no apologies for the leisurely nature of what’s being built here, with the entire network being green trails.

“It’s not going to be your gravity enduro, jumpy kind of trails for the 18-30 (year old) crowd. It’s more of the mass market leisure crowd, but also your more cross country riders that want to get out and go for longer rides. And the gravel scene as well, you’ll be able to ride your gravel bike on all of these trails,” says Annear.

Designing and building trails around ultra-rare trees

As WA Parks often does, there are two trail-building companies working on this network at the same time — Common Ground, who are also building Omeo, and Magic Dirt Trailworx, who’ve done work in Pemberton, Collie and Dwellingup.

While the tingle trees are only part of the network, they present a unique challenge for the builders in more ways than one.

With such a broad base, many of the roots of these trees only go about a metre down, but spiderweb far and wide to keep them alive and upright.

“This is the only place they grow, which is kind of scary. But we tweaked a few of our building methods to protect them. Rather than dropping below a tree where we know we are going to find roots, we always build above it,” says Dingey. “For the guys in the skid steers, we tend to drag backwards rather than push forwards, so we don’t pull those roots out.”

Both builders also stressed the importance of drainage as this is one of the wettest parts of WA. They also reminisced about the nightmare it was to ground truth and flag the trail corridors because of the impenetrable scrub, head-high sedge grass and the massive fallen tingle trees. There hasn’t been a bush fire or a controlled burn in these areas for quite some time, so the understory is wild and woolly.

“It was so dense, and with the trees that have died over centuries, you’d come up and stand next to it, and there are trunks that are three or four metres off the ground,” says Wilcox.

“There was one patch where they had six or seven in a row they had to navigate. These things are close to 100m long (fallen over, along the ground) some of them, and it’s not like you can just bust through one with a chainsaw. So you’ve got to thread yourself back and forth through these gigantic (downed trees) to find the right path through, while also managing elevation fall and gain, to set the builder up for construction,” he continues.

While the long-dead and naturally felled tingle trees created quite the headache for the initial phases of the build, where the trails have gone, they are a focal point.

“The whole purpose is to highlight those tingles. We tend to go near them, and they do hollow out inside, so we tried to bend them (the rider) into the tree — we actually call them little smoko huts,” Dingey laughs.

There is even a section where you can ride right through the middle of a tingle tree on a raised platform.

“There are some features built around an iconic tree which is a ride through, and there are some others I had a sneak peek at the other day where you’ll ride between two trees, and it’s been rock armoured,” says Hull. “We’re making sure to keep a reasonable distance from the tree to ensure we protect the roots, but I mean, you’re still close up to them.”

More than just the tingle trees

But it’s not just 60km of loops through the tingle trees these trails will explore.

“I think the unique thing about the (Walpole-Nornalup) National Park there and the wilderness that goes further out is that it’s not just a monotone singular landscape. It’s an extremely diverse set of ecotones,” says Wilcox.

“You might be riding through some of the world’s biggest trees, and then all of a sudden, you’ll pop out, and be in low grasslands for a while. Then you might go into low shrubs, and then Karri, and then you might go into these huge river valleys,” he continues.

While the giant trees are a defining feature of this new Valley of the Giants Project, Wilcox says there is no shortage of awe-inspiring and diverse places these loops will tour.

“There is a section of trail, if we get it right — it’s going to be the hardest section of trail to build — but it will be the most phenomenal section. You come out from this heavily enclosed, towering tree environment and then punch out into the river valley onto these near-vertical slopes. They are these seventy-degree side slopes, which we’re gonna be on the top of and benching in this trail. You’re looking down the river above these cascading rapids; it’ll be a couple of kilometres, I think, that will really define the experience,” he says.

With how impenetrable the bush around the Walpole-Nornalup National Park has been previously, these trails present a unique opportunity just to get out and see this area of the forest that has been all but inaccessible.

“When I had the indigenous group come through with me after we built the first trail, they were just so stoked going, ‘We need this in here. People need to be able to see this forest. We need these trails, so people can come through and actually see it,’” says Dingey

Parks and Wildlife leading the charge for more trails in WA

Being that this is such a sensitive environment, it’s a privilege that mountain bikers can experience this environment on their bikes in a format sponsored by the WA Parks and Wildlife Service.

We’re preaching to the choir when we talk about how trails can be built in sensitive areas with minimal impact — often even less than hiking trails — but the fact that Valley of the Giants has gone ahead is a testament to the work that Annear, Hull and others have done at Parks.

“We’ve developed the trail development series and mountain bike management guidelines. But more importantly, the development process has built a degree of confidence in people who might be opponents to show that there is some rigour to the process. And if we find values and things that mean they are a show stopper, then we don’t build it.

And we’ve got examples where we showed, okay, we’ve got this far and done all this work, but that’s not going to work here,” he says.

Zooming out, WA has a surprising amount of singletrack, with everything from the Marathon XC trails north of Dwellingup to the enduro trails in Collie that will host National Champs this year. Walpole is something totally different again.

“I think more so than trail style itself, it’s an immersion in the diversity of the landscape which will be the experience. So it won’t so much be side hits, gravity descents, or a heap of rock gardens, optional stuff off to the side,” says Wilcox.

“I think it’s going to be ‘Hey, have you been down there and ridden that amazing section next to the river? Or gone through that tingle grove where the trees are bigger than houses, and have you finished that awesome descent from the top of the giant tingle — the biggest tingle tree that they know about — and then descended from there down to the coast,” he continues.

Common Ground and Magic Dirt Trail Worx on the tools as we speak in Walpole and will open to riders in early 2025.