Mountain biking a classic near Saint Arnaud, New Zealand
Exploring New Zealand articles
One: New Zealand first impressions
Two: Intro to NZ mountain biking
Three: Unhinged—riding a NZ classic
Four: NZ sandflies are an itchy initiation
About three minutes into the downhill, my handlebars made glancing contact with a tree. Within another minute, it happened again, and then again—threatening to knock my bike sidelong into the forest. I stopped to take photos of the others as they twisted through a tangle of native beech forest, their tires bouncing over roots and handlebars brushing between trees.
Then it got steep.
After more than a week of failed attempts and building anticipation, we finally caught a weather window to ride the fabled trail called Unhinged: a steep, root-infested track that drops some 2,500 feet in three miles through dense forest near Saint Arnaud, New Zealand.
During a break about midway down—my body and mind exhausted—I turned to a few of our Kiwi guides and asked who would even think to build a track like that.
Wendy, Liz and Jane near the top of Unhinged.
“Alan Eskrick would,” they said.
Alan Eskrick, our South Island host, a mild-mannered farmer who’d worked in Antarctica, Canada and New Zealand, who’d been a surveyor, ski patroller, ski area general manager, print store owner, kayaker, climber, backpacker, sailor and mountain bike enthusiast. A true renaissance man and, at 70-something years old, a true expert mountain biker.
Jane, Liz and Bruce take a breather at the top of the climb.
While the idea to build Unhinged was Alan’s the effort took a community, and several of the people who made it happen were along for the ride that day: Alan’s wife, Liz, was key among them. A firecracker of a person in her own right, she’d worked as a nurse, surveyor and sheep farmer and has been a runner, kayaker, climber, sailor and mountain biker.
Her energy is contagious. One morning when the rain poured hard enough to derail our outdoor plans, she stepped onto the porch and declared to nobody and everybody: “Wahoo! It’s really raining!”
Wendy weaves through the tight trees of upper Unhinged.
Here’s another quick anecdote to put Liz’s veracity in perspective. After completing a fairly large mountain bike ride, we returned to Alan and Liz’s farm where Liz went to work weighing sheep while Alan prepared dinner. At dinner Liz, like all of us, had two glasses of wine. After dinner, Alan donned a reflective vest to take the dogs for a walk up the road while Liz appeared in a royal blue jump suit, her farming clothes. She went into the sunset, yanked on the cord of a gas-powered weed eater, and marched across a steep hillside cutting the brush away from about 200 yards of new fence line. She worked through sunset, past twilight and into the dark.
She just doesn’t stop.
Also along to show us the way down Unhinged were Bruce and Jane McCallum who live down the hill in Monaco, a small village near Nelson. I’ll only stop describing the accomplishments of our guides at this point so I can move on to writing about the trail, but trust that Bruce and Jane are equally accomplished and just as difficult to keep up with on a mountain bike.
After climbing a combination of fire roads and singletrack that averages 7 percent grade over 4 miles, we stopped to take in spectacular views that reached to the east coast and far into the island’s interior and the northern terminus of the Southern Alps. Although the four Kiwis agreed they rarely see anyone on trail, a group of about six 20-somethings from Christchurch arrived. They said they’d participated in an Enduro race on the West Coast the day before.
“How do you like the track?” Bruce asked after they said they’d ridden Unhinged before.
They gave a variety of answers along the lines of “such a special track” and “so much fun.”
Bruce smiled and said, simply: “We built it.”
It was subtle, but their surprise and admiration were apparent. It’s worth pausing to get your head around this. A group of 20-something racers specializing in technical Enduro downhill tracks said Unhinged is the bees knees. It was built—and is still ridden—by a group of men and women in their 70s. Alan, meanwhile—who is easily the group’s strongest and boldest technical downhiller—wears two hearing aids and experiences atrial fibrillation when he gets excited or pushes too hard.
From the stories they tell, it’s clear our friends were always hard core. They were serious runners, hikers, bikers and racers who set records in local races and events. What truly sets them apart, though is that they haven’t let it slip. This isn’t an empirical statement, but I’m not really concerned about its accuracy: Among their age group Alan, Liz, Jane and Bruce are, without question, world-class athletes.
Unhinged gets steep
Liz watches my first, failed attempt to ride the big root ball.
We paused to regroup after weaving through tight, native beech at the top of the descent and re-stacked the order we rode in. Alan led and quickly vanished in the forest.
I rode behind Bruce until he went around a huge tree, and I realized he had taken a cheater route. In kayking you’d call it “sneak.” In mountain biking it’s called a “ride around.”
I slammed on the brakes and stopped to look at the main line, which dropped some five or six feet over a stair-stepped root ball. Liz pulled up beside me and asked if I was going to ride it. I nodded yes, but wasn’t sure. I got off my bike and hiked back up, then rode into the drop, bouncing sideways and putting a foot down. “I’ll show you,” Liz said. “You were too far left.” She hiked her bike uphill and, without ceremony, rode into the drop with precision, floating through with a kind of feathery grace you’d expect to see on a dance floor. (Mind you, at the top of the descent 15 minutes before, she’d pulled over and mentioned she thought she might be getting a visual migraine.)
I hiked up for another try and, once again, was thrown off by the lumpy root ledges. At that point, rather than defeated, I felt my determination hardened and resolve deepened. I hiked up again, my chest heaving from the effort but also from the nerves that accumulated from two failed attempts. I took a deep breath or two and tried to let go of ideas about consequences and repercussions. I let the bike roll over the top ledge, aimed for the line I’d seen Liz float through a minute before, and grinned ear to ear at the bottom.
Whether professionally, personally, athletically or intellectually, accomplishing something you thought might be too scary is a unique reward in life, an unparalleled feeling of overcoming that can only be harnessed by pushing up to, and barely past, the limits imposed by fear.
Surviving the expert trail called Unhinged
Liz and her bearded collies, Belle and Jess, enjoy a roadside rest at the bottom of Unhinged.
Although the trail was already steep and technical, the huge root ball was really just the beginning of the most challenging part of the descent. For some 500 to 700 vertical feet the trail blindly dropped over rooty ledges, some of them a couple feet high. It was so steep in spots it was flat-out impossible to stop or slow down, only to control the descent and brace for the inevitable impact of arriving at the bottom of such a grade at speed.
We regrouped after a particularly heinous switchback, and I described my multiple attempts to ride the massive root ball higher on the ridge. Alan insisted I ride right behind him the rest of the way down, so I could follow his lines without pausing. I think he tried to go slow for my benefit, but I was still barely able keep up, my forearms throbbing from pulling at the brake levers and shoulders burning from holding my body upright down steep pitches that lurched over and across massive tree roots. Without the pressure of trying to keep up, there’s no way I’d have ridden it. And this was through a section he described as “easier.”
When we arrived as a group at the highway pullout a half hour later, we were physically and mentally tired—and as impressed as ever at the high caliber of riding on the South Island of New Zealand—and as impressed as ever with the athletic prowess of our friends.
“That’s why we named it Unhinged,” Alan said.
“How’s that?” we asked.
“We were still building the track, and someone decided you’d have to be a little unhinged to actually ride it. So welcome to the club.”