To say last season in Derby was a big one, would be an understatement. Hitting the highest of highs with Cuddles, Hazy Days, the Enduro World Cup and the trails being handed over to the community through the Blue Derby Foundation. There were also some lows with the landslide at the start of the riding season cutting off Hazy Days before it had been ridden and lower Air Ya Garn.
But as Glen Jacobs from World Trail said so eloquently, “Bad things happen, the way we look at it, there is no point in dwelling on it because something good always comes out of something bad.”
There has been a lot of trail work happening over the last 12 months, not just to get Derby’s airflow trails back up and running. We checked in to see what’s been happening over in this little slice of MTB paradise in Northeast Tassie.
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The Derby community comes together to rebuild
200mm of rain in 24 hours is going to swamp even the best-laid drainage. And with the ground already saturated from an exceptionally moist La Niña cycle, the hillside above Lower Air Ya Garn and Hazy Days slid. This took out a ~50m section of each — before Hazy had even opened — with the rubble overwhelming a section of Axehead climbing trail at the bottom of the valley.
With the season just about to kick off, the community sprung into action.
“We got a lot of practical assistance from people in town,” says Pete Coleborn, Trail Operations Manager at Dorset Council.
Multiple town folk donated the use of machines and diggers to clear the trails, while others spent countless hours on the business end of shovels and rakes to get the trails back open. It was all hands on deck.
“It’s pretty hard to go through and name all the community members that pitched in, so many people came out to help clear trees and repair sections of trail to get the network back open after that big rainfall event,” he continues.
When the slip happened there was quite a lot occurring behind the scenes. The Dorset Council was in the process of handing over management of the trails to the Blue Derby Foundation and was still trying to figure out who was responsible for what.
With the Enduro World Cup rolling into town a few months later and a big stabilisation job across multiple land tenures, Coleborn jokes this period was punctuated by a lot of pulling his hair out, even more stress and a stomach ulcer.
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Before they could dream of getting the World Trail machines back down into the rubble to start reshaping Hazy Days and Air Ya Garn, work had to be undertaken to ensure the overhanging cornice of earth, trees, and rock wasn’t going to collapse and slide down the hill again.
“We engaged a local engineering firm and ended up with a local engineer named David Hugo, who is a super keen mountain biker. His son’s favourite trail was Air Ya Garn. So he had a lot of motivation to help us out,” says Coleborn.
Hugo was able to provide the practical solutions they needed and work with contractors who often do earthworks for forestry — and, according to Coleborn, relished the opportunity to work on the trails.
“They collaborated, so Dave the engineer would suggest something, and ol’ mate forestry driver, his name was Ernie Harvey, would be like, ‘oh Dave, that’s not going to work mate, how bout this and this,” he says.
“Ultimately, they were able to come up with a solution that Dave was happy with to ensure the slope would be stabilised,” says Coleborn.
Glen Jacobs from World Trail tells us that they worked hand in hand with the stabilisation crew to help create the canvas for which Air Ya Garn 2.0 and Hazy Dayz would be constructed.
“We worked with that crew to say, well, we’re gonna come here, and go around there, and build a large berm here. Can you pull that ledge down further and build it up,” he explains.
The winter of 2023 was pretty typical for Tassie in terms of rainfall, but that’s still pretty darn wet, and the stabilisation work and new alignments are running strong. However Coleborn tells us that one storm in particular in July saw 60-70mm of precipitation drop over 24 hours and he was understandably nervous.
“The first thing I did the next day was go out and look at the slip. Thankfully all of the work was behaving as we had hoped. Thankfully, there has been no movement in that slip area despite the fact we had a wet June and July,” says Coleborn.
Getting it in just under the wire
The rebuild of Air Ya Garn really happened in two phases: a temporary solution for the EDR and then a trail for public consumption.
The reason that it ended up being this way is because the landslip happened across two tenures, managed by Sustainable Timbers Tas and Tas Parks, respectively. This meant permits were needed from both before any work could take place.
“We were on alert and ready to go from the day we heard about the landslip, but the different departments, with different permitting, and this and that — it took forever,” says Jacobs. “There were some sessions of that hill we could get into, and then about 60-80m further down, it was on another department’s land.”
With all of the faff and waiting for the rubber stamps needed to get on with the repairs, it was only a week prior to the EDR that the Blue Derby Trail Crew and World Trail were cleared to get into the slide after the stabilisation works were complete.
“For the EDR, we literally finished the last work on that area as Ruaridh (Cunningham) — who was in charge of course safety and could shut a trail down if he deemed it unsafe — we were literally walking out of Air Ya Garn when he came down. He rolled out of the trail behind us as we finished on his final sweep before the stage went live,” says Coleborn.
“Ernie Harvey was up there till 3am in the excavator the night before trying to get it finished off. I was up there at eight o’clock the night before race day, scraping off the mud that had come up. The rest of the crew were out there on the morning of the EDR just finishing off the last bits again — after the practice day and the amateur day it just got smashed,” Coleborn continues.
Spinning back the clock to March when the EDR rolled into Derby for the third time, it was so wet that trout in the Ringarooma were headed uphill in search of drier ground.
“As any trail builder, or even trail rider knows, if there is a new trail that’s been compacted and more water comes along and you put 1,000 tires on it, it’s going to get squishy. Had we been able to get in earlier, or it hadn’t rained it would have been a different thing. But we had to make do with the situation and get something temporary for the race,” says Jacobs.
From mud to masterpiece | Air Ya Garn 2.0
With the EDR’s stress behind them, the busy season over, and not having to chase down paperwork, the World Trail team could get in there and work their magic.
Behind that, this new section of trail was going to become constructed in the rubble of a landslide; it’s what you call pre-disturbed ground. The slide had taken out all of the vegetation and ecological values in the scar it left, meaning the trail crew could unleash the full power of their imagination.
“We sent Rhys Atkinson in there to get in and shape everything, and it was just a creative free-for-all. As long as all of the typical trail-building priorities and goals are dealt with — drainage, intercepted trains above the trail, and things like that — we could pretty well put anything you like in,” says Jacobs.
And with that, the connection was restored, and what is arguably Derby’s crown jewel is back up and running from top to trailhead.
“Rhys got in there, put his magic touch on it, and brought the new alignment back across the slip. We made a few little adjustments and had to put up fencing across one section to protect that huge sandbag wall, but now Air Ya Garn is functioning as it was originally designed,” says Coleborn.
The trail crew has been in to give the rest of the trail a bit of a haircut, tidying up some berms and fixing up a few bits and pieces to ensure the whole thing is running primo.
“It’s so fast,” says Coleborn. “You come out of the forest, and all of a sudden, you’re in this moonscape in the slip area, and you’re just like, woah. There is the huge, we’re calling it the ‘infinity berm’ — kinda like an infinity pool — the edge of this berm just looks straight across out over the river valley and out in the bush.”
Just as quickly as you ride out into the otherworld slip scar, you drop down into a series of jumps, and you’re back into the original alignment of Air Ya Garn.
Down the line, Chris Cafe, Chair of the Blue Derby Foundation, tells us there are plans to regenerate the vegetation in the landslip scar, but all the focus has been on getting the trails up and running.
What about Hazy Days?
The other casualty of the landslide was Hazy Days. This green-rated airflow trail was a first for Derby and World Trail.
Air Ya Garn is built so that it can be ridden to rack up air miles or from top to bottom without your tyres ever leaving the ground. Despite being a black-rated trail, this meant a vast cross-section of riders could enjoy this descent, which led to some issues with traffic and folks coming down at wildly different speeds.
So to solve the problem, World Trail built a miniature version of Air Ya Garn. It’s super wide, with multiple lines of rolling features and no forced risk. With that said, for the more skilled riders, there are plenty of sneaky lines and side hits on offer.
Hazy Days also filled a gap in the Derby trail network, offering a descent from Black Stump suitable for a true beginner. Meaning a first-time mountain biker could hire a bike in town and get a taste of why shuttling is so much fun.
The trail also pays a touching tribute to Jeffrey Hayes. A loveable larrikin whose unusual sayings and smile were known to riders around the world, he was a pillar of the town. Sadly Jeffery Passed away in 2020, and Hazy Days immortalised him in the network that he loved so much.
With the trail set to open at the end of 2022, the landslide took out the lower section before anyone had the chance to ride it. A gut punch for everyone in town, Jacobs compared it to when you go on a holiday you’ve been counting scrimping and saving for ages, you get there, and the weather is crappy, and the tour operator says you should have been here last week; it was beautiful.
“It was heartbreaking. You build something that everybody can get stoked on, and everybody can get pumped on, and then they don’t get to ride it. You’d say you should have seen what was here, and then you look down, and there is a bit of a berm 80m down the hill amongst all the rubble,” says Jacobs.
World Trail and the Blue Derby trail crew have been hard at work reconnecting Hazy Days with the trailhead so it can be ridden as it was initially designed. At the time of writing, Coleburn tells us there is only a small amount of work remaining, the hard part of which is heli-dropping in a few bridges. But they are waiting on, you guessed it, the permit.
“There has been a lot of work that’s gone on in the bottom part of Hazy. And anyone that’s enjoyed the top half, when you’re able to ride from the top all the way through to the trailhead, I think that experience of enjoying the top half will be magnified fourfold, being able to enjoy it all the way through,” says Coleborn. “It’s something to be very excited about.”
With that, the junction at the top of Hazy Days, Air Ya Garn, Kumma Gutza and Return to Sender has been reworked, and the approach from the shuttle drop-off has been revamped to make it a little less daunting for beginner riders.
Bringing the Blue Tier back to its former glory
As Glen Jacobs puts it, it’s been nearly a decade since World Trail started construction on Blue Derby. And in that time A LOT of tyres have gone down the trails in this corner of Northeast Tassie.
The Blue Tier is one trail that is starting to show its age. Starting at the tippy top of the Blue Tier Forest Reserve and connecting with Big Chook, it descends 21km into Weldborough.
“The top section in the alpine was pretty degraded, and it wasn’t to the standard we want to present to people,” says Coleborn. “To rehabilitate it to its former glory is pretty exciting to us; this is what the product should be and what people should be enjoying up there.”
The weather at the top of the Tier is pretty harsh, and being at a higher altitude, the ground freezes during the winter.
“When the soil freezes and thaws, that pulls out some of the compaction and leaves the soil fluffy. When you put X amount of tires over it for a number of years, that’s a different thing,” says Jacobs
Coleborn also explains the soil up there is quite different to that beautiful decaying granite you find in the Derby trails.
“It’s quite a degraded soil, and so all the chemical bonds that hold a lot of soils together are kind of broken down. There’s not much plasticity in the soil up there, and it doesn’t hold together as well. Then that combined with high-intensity rainfall events, which are typical at the top of the Tier, has meant it’s eroded more quickly than the rest of the network,” says Coleborn.
So World Trail and the Trail Crew are going end-to-end, giving the Blue Tier the same treatment that Flickity Sticks received a few years ago. It will essentially be a brand new trail on the same alignment.
It’s no doubt a challenging environment to work in. Between the altitude, the weather and the kilometre hike-a-bike into the section they are working on now, it’s no walk in the park.
Work started back in May, and will continue through the summer until the job is done. If you ride the Blue Tier over the summer, you’ll probably see the guys and gals out there working with a rolling closure, so there will be a short ~50m section that will be closed off where the crew is digging.
We always need more cuddles!
Cuddles was built specifically for debut when the EDR rolled into town. And while it’s not necessarily breaking news, literally everyone we’ve spoken to in the last six months, both locals and visitors alike, has absolutely raved about it.
“Cuddles is markedly different in style to a lot of the other more challenging trails in the network. Shear Pin, Detonate, and Black Dragon — even to a degree Kumma Gutza — aren’t fast trails. Whereas Cuddles has some really big features and can be ridden at quite a high pace, if you have the skill to do so,” says Coleborn.
“It’s a trail that’s fun for so many people, and it’s up to you how you attack it. It’s not a green trail at all, but it’s definitely not just a nasty black diamond. World Trail’s protocol from day one was to make things inclusive — we’re not dumbing down anything, we’re just allowing a wider range of people to use and enjoy the trail,” says Jacobs.
“There are so many opportunities for more trails to come off of that area. That precinct has so many rock slabs, they are beautiful, huge and visible. They’re daunting, and they’re grippy,” says Jacobs.
According to Coleborn, it’s bedded in beautifully, and the only complaint they get about the trail is that folks wish it were longer.
“You always want some more Cuddles, mate. You get to the bottom, and you want to go back for more,” says Coleborn
Blue Derby Foundation
Last time we were in Derby, the news had just broken that the Dorset Council had voted to go ahead with the transfer of management of the network to the Blue Derby Foundation (BDF). They were just entering the ‘holy crap, look at all of this paperwork’ phase of the transition.
A year on, the mountain of paperwork has been worked down to more of a molehill, and according to Mark McCann, one of the BDF Directors, the transition has been smooth.
“Sometimes we’re a bit of a slow-moving machine because we’ve also got one or two businesses that we’re running around town, and the Blue Derby Foundation is largely run on a volunteer basis. It was a pretty massive undertaking, but there is a fair bit of good stuff happening,” he says.
The origin of the not-for-profit charity was to look after the Blue Derby brand, merchandise, partnerships, fundraising, day-to-day management of the network and spearheading other projects around town. But the larger goal was to essentially give the trails to the town folk to manage so that they could not only have a say as to what happened with the network, but it also served to safeguard Blue Derby should the council sour on mountain biking.
The process has advanced to the point that they have actual paid staff working on things and a whole new range of sponsorship arrangements for businesses and major partners to help fund the ongoing upkeep of the network. McCann tells us now the foundation is maintaining everything except for the actual trail maintenance itself — because that’s Coleborn’s job.
“It’s all going quite well, but we’re starting to find our feet and understand what’s involved,” says McCann.
One of the major avenues that the Blue Derby Foundation has been pushing for to raise money for the trails, is the accommodation booking platform on the website. AirBNB takes something in the ballpark of $300,000 AUD in booking commissions, and some clever folks in town said, ‘well, hang on a minute, that could be going back into the trails.’
“It’s 100% up and running, and we are consistently getting more properties online, and it’s starting to generate some money for us at the moment. But it has the potential to generate some serious funds for ongoing maintenance,” says McCann. “All of that money that would otherwise go to these big companies instead goes back into the town and the trails.”
The Blue Derby Foundation still has a big job ahead in keeping the trails running, and there are plenty of things on the boil for the network and the town itself. Most of all, we can’t wait to get back!
Photos: Kristina Vackova / @kiphotomedia, Flow MTB