In late 2022, the wrath of La Nina was thoroughly unloaded on Victoria. Coming after what was already an extremely wet year, this latest atmospheric river left the State underwater.
La Larr Ba Gauwa/Harcourt Park was battered, and the trail committee had to make the hard decision to close the park.
“We had tunnel erosion that you could stand in, particularly on the fire trails, that was up to your chest. That’s huge, and it really changes the landscape,” said Nick Byrne, the Chair of La Larr Ba Gauwa Park/Harcourt Committee of Management.
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“The Committee doesn’t want to close the park, we’re there to try and keep it open and accessible, but with the scale of the damage, we had no choice,” he says.
The La Larr Ba Gauwa/Harcourt Trail Committee had only re-formed in May of 2022, and this closure was one of its first major actions — talk about bad luck.
And unfortunately, the park has remained closed ever since. Initially opening about five years ago, Harcourt relies heavily on volunteers for routine trail maintenance, but the damage the park had sustained was well beyond what a worker bee could address.
That’s soon to change, however, with the announcement that South Australia-based Trailscapes would be coming in to fix up and improve the park.
We last rode at Harcourt when we explored the Goldfields Track. Come along for the adventure
Harcourt Granite | A blessing and a curse
La Larr Ba Gauwa has traditionally featured heavily in Flow’s Bike reviews as the rock features provide an ideal venue to find the limits of geometry, suspension and tyres. However, that same granite is part of why Harcourt came out so rough after the storms.
“The reason these rocks are exposed is through erosion, as in water creating and revealing these awesome rock features. But at the same time, that becomes a real problem in terms of maintenance because that’s also where the water wants to run,” Byrne says.
Certain parts of the network came out of the storms okay, but other trails like Trail 2 / Girra, which is one of the most popular in the network, and Trail 1 / Wanyarra got absolutely hammered.
“If a trail has flooded once before, there is a good chance it’s going to happen again, and so we’re going to be looking for better ways to control the water. We’ll try and add a little bit of flow and reimagine and improve some of the features,” says Trailscapes Boss Garry Patterson.
Byrne tells Flow he is keenly aware folks are getting antsy, and while there have been a few scallywags who have ignored the trail stoppage, for the most part, the riding community has honoured the closure. With that, that some of the trails are in a rideable condition, and many locals have asked the committee why they haven’t simply closed off the trails that are too damaged to ride and opened the remained of the network.
“We’re a volunteer-run organisation, and everyone on the committee has full-time employment doing other things, so it’s not like we have the resources to police this or enforce compliance,” he says. “If we were to open up part of the trail network, it then becomes even harder to keep people out. And if there is an incident, that is going to be a big problem.”
The crux of the work that Patterson and his crew will be doing is fixing the damage, and also introducing drainage rocks and gravel which will be incorporated to improve the sub-surface drainage — which is a slow process. Thankfully the water has created a detailed blueprint for them to achieve a good result.
“We can see exactly where the water is coming from, there’s a lot of little springs that pop up that you just wouldn’t have seen and wouldn’t have been apparent during the initial construction. We can say, ‘Okay, we need to extend this rock armouring a metre on either side because the water is actually a bit further than what originally appeared,’” he says.
Having a professional trail building company coming in to fix this type of extensive damage also presented the opportunity to update features with the latest techniques, and create trails that keep up with the evolution of how mountain bikers are riding.
“When you initially build a project, you may build a feature that morphs into be not quite what you wanted. It’s easy for us to come in and give it a few tweaks here and there and get those entries and exits working better, and fix up those rock features that have become a little too clunky,” he says.
Patterson tells us that beyond just rejuvenating the trail network, they’ll add a little bit of Trailscapes flare and says the trails will be a little more dynamic than the last time you rode them.
Repairing the Harcourt the right way
By the time Harcourt opens to the public, it will have been closed for nearly 12 months. While we can rattle off a few individual trails that have experienced similarly long gaps of service, we can’t think of another public trail network that has been closed for such a long time.
After the initial storm, the trail committee went through an auditing process and mapped every issue in the park with geo-tagged imagery of all the damage. Working with DELWP (now called DEECA), it was clear they would need to find some money to pay for the repairs.
We had to go through a funding application process as there were funds available from the Department of Environment, Energy and Climate Action. The Department were very supportive, and we secured close to $800k for the restoration project. We just needed it to be clear that we had a problem, document it quickly and put it into a shareable form,” says Byrne.
This came in the form of what basically amounts to a Google map with points for each of the images so that you could clearly see the visual impact of the damage, not just in the actual erosion, but the widespread nature of the damage across the park and access roads.
Byrne tells us during this process, they also reached out to trail companies to get a ballpark of what the fix would cost so they’d have a rough figure to quote to the funding authority. The park managed to come up with over half a million dollars in funding from the Victorian Government via the Department of Environment Energy and Climate Action, which is not only going towards fixing the trails, but also secured funds to upgrade the camping area and amenities within the park.
The Committee is also continuing to foster its relationship with Djarra people of Dja Dja Wurrung country and is collaborating with the Traditional Owners through the rebuild.
“We also secured monies within the funding that not only embeds support to meet our cultural heritage requirements, it includes allocations that enables Trailscapes to assist with capability building of local Djarra people for ongoing maintenance of our trail network” said Byrne.
As it stands, Byrne is expecting the trails will be ready for riders in October. It’s been a long time coming and tells Flow he sympathises with folks who are frustrated with the extended closure — as he’s part of that group — and wanted to thank folks for respecting the closure of the trails.
“This is a great opportunity for us to not only fix the damage but also address some of the annual issues we’re experiencing too. It’s a nice chance to refresh the trails where there have been some water-related, and winter-related issues that have kept popping up,” he says.
He also wanted to encourage folks not to succumb to their urges as now the park will essentially be a construction site. They want to keep everyone safe, and ensure the work can be finished as quickly as possible.
Once we have a definite date for the reopening of La Larr Ba Gauwa/Harcourt, we’ll update this story. Stay tuned folks!
