Exploring the dirt tracks near Queenstown New Zealand Episode 7

In this episode, I ride through the forest in the dark, wind my way along the edge of a stunning lake. Then I meet up with Royal Enfield Ambassador James Fisher, who shows me one of his local tracks of his hometown of Queenstown. It was an early start as I was meeting up with James Fisher, a Royal Enfield Ambassador, to go to an event near Queenstown. The guys at Royal Enfield put me in touch with James as he knew a lot of the tracks around Queenstown. James was kind enough to say, for sure, let's go on a couple of rides when you're here. How cool is it riding along narrow winding tracks through the forest in the dark? It kind of feels like riding in a tunnel. Ah, high beam works a bit better. I wanted to ride faster, but with a lack of light, the corners came up a lot quicker and it was a lot harder to gauge the tightness of the turns. I made it out of the lake track to the main dirt road. I turned right, but just to double check, I pulled up the app Gaia GPS. There was still no reception, but this app works offline and it'd be able to give me my position. Then I could easily scan the map to make sure I was heading in the right general direction. I made it onto the tarmac. Morning. Well, that was a little cold. It started off, my visor also fogged up a bit because I was going so slow. Obviously, warmer inside than out of the helmet, but got through it a little loose. Made it to the main road and been able to get reception and got a message through. Today's plan was to meet up with the guy, James, who's one of the Royal Enfield's ambassadors, and then go to an event that was on, but apparently it's a no-go. So he suggested, why don't we go for a ride in Queenstown, skip something or other. So we'll probably go and do that. Didn't really need to get up that early anyway. Oh well, these things happen. So that's the plan. Go for a ride there and then, yeah, also check out Queenstown. Just a bit worried about getting at 100km an hour with how cold it is. So we'll see. Should be, well, if I have to stop, I have to stop. I'm not in a rush, but I don't have to be anywhere at a certain time anymore. So I think it's about two hours. Better hit the road. It was 169km from the lake to Queenstown. There actually was a shorter way to get there, but it involved a small ferry trip. But I couldn't find out much information of when it ran, so I thought it was safer to take the long way round. One thing I have noticed is that they have a lot of gravel trails for bicycles, and they have decent infrastructure like these bridges. They're not technical trails like mountain bike tracks, but not sealed for road bikes either. Kind of in between for gravel bikes. There was a sign that said Devil's Staircase Lookout, so I pulled up. I gather they're talking about the road as it steps up beside the lake. It looks like they're building covers over building sites here. I gather so they can work all year round. I drop down into the main part of Queenstown. I pulled over as I had to find somewhere to stay. I found a place I could put up my tent within walking distance of town. Seeing James suggested two bike rides, and I do love a mountain town. I decided to stay in town for a couple of nights. So a full day. That would be interesting, but I'll be probably riding the whole day anyway. I'm going to set up a tent and then go and have a look in town itself. I haven't been to Queenstown before. Well, not this one. Always best to make sure the ground is clear where you're going to put your tent. It's good to get those off and dry my feet after yesterday's water excursion. I walk the one kilometre into town. Ah, mountain town's the only place you can walk around with a helmet on and not seem weird. There were people chilling in the park next to water. And why wouldn't you with views like that? I grabbed something to eat and headed back as James was heading over. James rocked up and seeing it was later in the afternoon, we were straight into it. Skippers Canyon was located only 12 kilometres from the centre of Queenstown. So this is James, he's the Royal Enfield Ambassador and he's where are we? We're in Queenstown and we're going to head down the Skippers Road, Skippers Canyon Road. It's a nice gravel road, winds down really deep into the into the valley. So where we go, you can't really get any further. Steep drop offs on the side of the road. Lots of winding turns, it's pretty spectacular and pretty hectic if you get it wrong. Try not to get it wrong. All right, let's see what it's like. We climbed up the ridge. That was the valley we were going to drop into. It looks like a lot of fun. This is Canyon River Road. The road was carved and blasted right out of the solid rock. It took 22 years to build the road using only black gunpowder and hand drills. The track is so narrow, just a single lane, but you can ride and drive vehicles in both directions. I'm not sure how you'd get two four drives past each other in some of these sections. There is a mountain bike trail on the other side of the valley that pops out here and this is the track they use to get back up. This is the hotel when there was miners. This is I think the second richest river in the world after the Klondike in 1800. The miners had to walk from Queenstown to where we're going to go and it would take them like a week to get in there. I got my first sighting of the Shotover River which is what created this incredible place. We started to descend down towards the river. James took the sidetrack down to the riverbank. It goes up there, off into the distance where it gets real narrow and real steep, and then there's a little blast down there and then it drops off again. Crystal clear that water. Yeah you can drink this. That was the narrowest part of the road and that was there. I think that took something stupid like half the time to build the whole road was just that one section. We rode back up onto the main track. The guys who started AJ Hackett, Henry Van Assen, whoever his name was, the first bungee they did off that, and it's still every year in May they open it to the public and you can bungee that one still. But it's just the water pipe, closed water pipe. For a while it was the world's highest. I think homemade elastic bungee. James suggested we head down another sidetrack and I do love the sidetrack. The track started to get a lot steeper. So James headed down the track, well more like slid down the track. While I waited for him to test the traction of the track back up one of the jet boats came along the river. The bike actually got more traction than we thought it would. As there was nothing down there we decided to continue back up. This was the first steeper hill I'd tried on Scran and even with stock tyres it had no issues. We continued along Skippers Canyon Road. It's a long way down and there's the jet boat on its way back. This bridge to Skippers Point wasn't the first bridge here. The original bridge was built in 1866 but was lower down and prone to damage from flooding. It was eventually replaced by the current bridge that took over two years to build from 1898 to March 1901. One of James's mates stopped to say hi. He was a motorbike guide taking a client on a ride. We all continued up the hill to the end of the track. The canyon and Skipper Point were named after Skipper Malcolm Duncan who discovered gold in the canyon in 1862. So there's the whole village here so that was the school for all the miners and the families that lived here. There was one just there as well another building but it burned down only a couple years ago and campers lit a fire in there and that was the end of that. Those helicopters there and fire brigade and farmer. So this is um it goes down there and around and back along and you get onto these flats over here and there's a big old quarry um and there's a lot of really fun stuff in there but you know more with dirt bikes. It took me 10 attempts to get up on it. We rode back past the restored school building and back down the hill to the bridge. How high is the bridge? Well this high about 100 meters James said there was one more thing to check out. So that was epic. How's that having that as your local ride? Oh it's amazing we can go after work bus down there for a couple of hours at the sunset come back up. It's pretty spectacular world-class riding. And really the whole area is world-class. Well James had to leave to go to a party and I'm just going to take some photos before I leave here too. It's yeah oh that word stunning and then yeah back to the tent and probably pass out. I might go into town and find some food we'll see but I still have to go down that mountain road which will be a bit of fun. You can see the chairlifts waiting for the winter snow. How is this view dropping back down into Queenstown? If this was just an afternoon ride I can only imagine what riding all day tomorrow will be like. In the next episode we head into some valleys, ride through the woods along rutted tracks and beside some rivers.