What’s next for Maydena Bike Park?


It seems like just yesterday we got the first teasers of Maydena Bike Park. Cryptic social media posts spoke of stepping into the wilderness with scenes of wild Tasmania terrain.

That was five years ago. Crazy!

And to celebrate its fifth birthday, Maydena Bike Park has released an ambitious Master Plan outlining its path for the next five years. This document lays out plans ranging from an additional 50km of trails, more accommodation and off-the-bike activities, and talk of a chairlift!

Related:

How did we get here?

Maydena Bike Park officially opened in January 2018. In March of that year, Southwest Tassie was hit with widespread flooding damaging a great deal of the park. In 2019, the Upper Derwent Valley was ablaze, with fires burning within 6km of the park. In 2020, Covid-19 took us into unprecedented times, which continued into 2021 and 2022. Even still, Maydena has managed to thrive, and become a destination most Aussie mountain bikers will say they’d like to visit.

“It’s certainly been really rewarding to see the park grow the way it has. Obviously, it’s been hard work and very stressful, and we haven’t had the smoothest run, in terms of natural disasters, I suppose,” says Maydena and Dirt Art head Simon French.

Step into the wilderness they said. Five years on Maydena is still a wild place to ride.

In 2018, Maydena was also pushing into uncharted territory. Building a private gravity park from scratch like this in Australia hadn’t really been done before.

“We weren’t a ski resort or an existing business creating a bike park, and we were aiming to do it on a pretty large scale in an Australian context. We came across things you wouldn’t even think about as being issues, like what you can and can’t do without a ‘bike patrol,’ because there is no such thing as a ski patrol in Tasmania,” says French.

In that time, the park has grown from 35km of the scariest gravity trails in the country, to over 80km of singletrack designed to push riders at every level, from those who have never ridden a mountain bike to professional shredders.

In that time, the Maydena has hosted XC, DH and Enduro National Champs, built out its own events schedule, and this year will host an Enduro World Cup — formerly known as the EWS. Not bad for five years.

Because Maydena is a private bike park, built on mostly private land, they can do a lot of things a publicly-owned facility can’t.

Maydena Trail Association

Before the Bike Park, Maydena was a timber town that provided materials to a newsprint mill in Boyer, TAS just east of New Norfolk. In a tale that is all too common in Tassie, the Maydena timber depot closed down in 1990, and the town went quiet.

Frankly, outside the Bike Park, the town is still pretty quiet, but an influx of permanent residents have moved to town to live and ride bikes. And so a major goal within the Master Plan is to help form a community trail association that could lobby to create a public asset on the opposite side of town that can be freely used by the community.

“There are so many really cool natural tourism assets, and natural spots around — big caves, sinkholes, wild rivers, waterfalls — on the other side of town that are really iconic. But most of them are underutilised. Most people don’t even know they are there. So to be able to stitch them together with a trail network, I think, would be amazing,” says French.

French goes on to say that the Bike Park wouldn’t deliver this project, it would come through the Trail Association, and the intention is to build a free-to-access public trail network.

“The soil on the other side of the valley is all quartzite gravel. So it’s good here for year-round riding, whereas Maydena gets a little slippery in the depths of winter,” says French. “I suppose the way I’ve put it to a few people is like you picked up Blue Derby and bolted it onto the side of Maydena. That’s sort of what we’d like to see, with the long format loops and the more rolling hills landscape.”

A major part of the Master Plan for the Bike Park, is supporting the local community and that includes helping to create a public asset for folks who live in town to use and enjoy. But also to even out the seasonality of the tourism market.

Trails within the park

The Maydena Master Plan outlines the addition of a further 50km of trails within the boundaries of the Bike Park. Many of the bullet points cover what you’d classify as consolidation and connectivity to make the park work better. Still, there are also a number of bullet points that will further diversify what Maydena has to offer like climbing trails and non-gravity riding.

“There’s certainly a couple of bigger projects, so more wilderness format, adventure descending trails that we want to put in. There’s also a bunch of other contouring trails and things like that, that really open up the current network to more trail riding,” says French.

Maydena’s bread and butter is gravity riding, but the Bike Park has been constantly expanding what it has to offer.

Also on the agenda is a massive skills and freeride park on the lower part of the mountain, which French speculates will be the biggest in Australia, akin to Queenstown’s Dream Track.

Slightly less exciting for us average Janes and Joes, Maydena will also be constructing a dedicated training and testing facility where brands and teams can come to test and train away from the public eye.

“A lot of people need to test in the offseason and have products online for their teams in the race season,” says French. “So if they’ve got products that are very early stage, or something that’s not ready for the public domain, they can do that away from the public eye.”

Beyond what’s listed in this doc, French also tells us there is quite a bit of new gravity trail currently being constructed in the park — including a handful specifically for the Enduro World Cup.

A new uplift solution for Maydena

The uplift at Maydena is an experience in itself. About half an hour bumping up the mountain in a packed van, you get to see how the forest changes as you ascend Abbotts Peak; you’re also greeted with sweeping views of the Derwent Valley.

In the near term, the Master Plan outlines that the shuttle road with get a glow up, being resurfaced to reduce the wear and tear on the vans, making the ride less bumpy — we would also speculate it will speed up turn around too.

It’s a long shuttle to the top of the Bike Park because you have to ascend over 800 vertical metres, and it’s also extraordinarily scenic. But with the number of folks visiting the park, it may not be the best solution.

“Based on our growth trajectory, by year 10, we believe that we’ll be at the point where our shuttle busses will be maxing out, in terms of how many more we can put on the road and run the service, both efficiently for the customer and for us in terms of keeping everything rolling,” he says. “So we need to look at another way of doing things.”

French tells us the last thing they want to do is to cap numbers, so they’re getting out on the front foot and exploring putting in a chairlift from the base, 300 vertical metres up the mountain to just above Eastside Link. This would take a significant amount of strain off the vans heading up from the base area, but it would also put all of the infrastructure on land the Bike Park owns, simplifying the planning and approvals process.

“The other reason to put it there is it avoids the really significant, mature eucalypt forest. So we are not having to clear large parts of old-growth wilderness, which obviously we wouldn’t do,” he continues.

With the chairlift heading halfway up the mountain, it would cover the majority of the trail network. But there would still be the option to jump on a shuttle to the summit.

With the chairlift running to what’s basically the halfway point of the network, you can access all but about 15 of the network’s 80+ trails. From the top station, a summit shuttle service would still run.

Maydena is just starting the feasibility work around developing a chairlift, which isn’t projected until the park’s 10th year. So don’t hold your breath.

Sustainability

Mountain biking and tourism have an impact on the environment. Whether it’s cutting trails, running shuttles or getting there from Hobart, there is no way to get around it, so Maydena is trying to address this effect.

“The crux of it is that we want to be carbon neutral in the not-too-distant future. The other big part is working to rehabilitate the land that we’ve purchased that has been clear-felled in the past and improve that by replanting, but also working on waterway quality and just generally cleaning things up,” says French.

Maydena is located in a spectacular part of Tasmania, and the Bike Park aims to clean up its act and repair some of the damage done by those who came before them.

This cleanup includes addressing weeds and some of the biomass left behind by the previous logging activity, in areas like where they’re developing the campground — more on that below.

“We’re working towards anything we can do to help offset the impact that comes as a result of our tourism business and make other improvements around the local environment areas,” says French.

Places to lay your head and things to do

The town of Maydena itself is tiny, and AirBNBs dominate the landscape. For the amount of traffic that goes through town, there simply aren’t enough beds.

One of the major issues raised in Bike Park’s engagement sessions with the community was informal camping. In February of this year, the Maydena will open a campsite on the north end of town, next to the Tyenna River, with 70 sites. This is the first stage of what’s been dubbed the Maydena Wilderness Retreat, which, when finished, will also have pod-style cabins, showers, powered and unpowered sites and other amenities.

Also laid out in the Master Plan is the development of hotel-style accommodation. French says they’re hoping to attract developers to build stays on both the high and low end of the spectrum, and there is already interest.

Caves, sinkholes, waterfalls and rivers — there are so many unique natural assets on Maydena’s doorstep that most folks have no idea are there.

The other thing that Maydena lacks is, well, everything. Outside the Bike Park, there is nowhere to eat or drink. There’s no grocery store or bottle shop; if you need fuel, you’ll have to fill up before hitting Westerway. This coming year kicks off plans for a commercial precinct. The first cabs off the rank will be NSR Racing (suspension tuning and service) and establishing a third-party-operated gym and multi-practice health facility within the main park area. Eventually, the goal is to expand that into offerings like a pharmacy, grocery store, and petrol station.

Maydena is also hoping to attract some gastro tourism and has just opened a new restaurant with a menu designed by the new Head Chef, Matt Griggs, who has run acclaimed restaurants in Melbourne and Hobart. The Master Plan also notes a commercial kitchen to go in 2023 as part of the Beyond the Bikes Project, which will eventually encompass things like a sauna and cold plunge, hiking trails, rock climbing and bouldering, zip lines, and ATV tours.

With a new head chef and second restaurant and Maydena, the food available at the Bike Park has progressed past toasties and nachos, and they’re aiming to attract some gastro tourism too.

“We want to create some other activities to smooth out the seasonality of the business and also give people who aren’t mountain bikers the chance to come and visit and get involved in some of the tourism activity available in the region we think is underutilised.

“The intention is not to create this massive non-mountain bike focused resort. It’s completely the opposite, just to bring in more mountain bikers and give them more things to do,” says French.

The Maydena Draft Master Plan is an ambitious path for the Bike Park to follow in the coming years, and it puts in black and white that they have no plans to rest on their laurels or slow down any time soon. You can read it for yourself here.

It appears you're using an old version of Internet Explorer which is no longer supported, for safer and optimum browsing experience please upgrade your browser.