Mark contacted me on Friday arvo to say that he was suddenly unable to attend the Marysville ride, and asked if I would take over the role of ride leader on the day.
It had been a couple of years since I'd led a ride at Marysville, and I was a bit worried that I might have forgotten the routes that I used to take.
15 of us hit the tracks just after 9am. We did the usual warm-up to the hilltop junction point, and everyone made it up in good time. I figured that meant there were no beginners in the pack, and so we did a quick loop and headed up to a rocky climb to give those who wanted to challenge themselves a chance to blow off some steam.
After watching a few attempts up the shaly rocks, we all headed back down to the main tracks. Here I discovered that my recollections of the trails were a bit faulty, but thankfully Stuart had a GPS that showed where we were, and where I had hoped to be.
We did the usual challenge track, and as conditions were dry, I didn't offer an alternative route. Then it was into some tighter twisty tracks, before heading across to the creek area below Marysville township for an early lunch.
After lunch, it was across to the Dom Dom side of the road for a play in the slightly damper conditions. Still mostly dry, but with enough slickness in the clay to keep you wary. Some of the tighter tracks had degraded since I'd last been there, and one bog hole near a creek crossing had become very messy. Thankfully there was a new path cut around it, but even that was a bit challenging.
We headed up to Dom Dom saddle, and here my navigation skills failed again - I was looking for a track that I normally used, but it seemed to have vanished. After cruising back and forth a few times, I gave up and took us back the way we had come.
As we still had plenty of time and fuel available, I decided to have a play up Strickland Link track, and then back down Strickland Spur track. The only problem was that I wasn't used to getting to it from the homewards bound direction, and I managed to lead the guys astray a couple of times until we found the right track.
Going up Strickland Link was easy - it had been graded sometime recently, and the rocky parts had been smoothed out. We reached the top, and headed down Strickland Spur tk. I initially thought it too had been graded, but not much further on the rocky sections began - that was more like what I remembered!
I enjoyed bouncing around on the rocks on the big TTR, but there was a bit of cursing going on when we regrouped at the bottom…
From there it was back to the cars and homeward bound.
Thanks to everyone for coming - I hope the few challenging sections weren't too off-putting.
Thanks also go to Lefty for being our tail man for the whole day.