It was exactly one year after we rode the Timber Trail the first time that we set off to ride the Bridge to Nowhere ride with a much smaller group, maybe they knew something about the ride I didn’t.
The ride is close to Raetahi which is about 15 minutes away from Ohakune. We love the small town vibe so decided to stay in Raetahi in a holiday house. As the Bridge ride was ‘only’ 35km long, staying in Raetahi also meant we could ride from the house to the start of the trail, ‘only’ adding another 20km to the ride…are alarm bells starting to ring for anyone else because they weren’t for me and they should have been !
My husband bought the weather station away with us so I can confidently say it was 4 degrees when we set off from Raetihi on the mid-April Saturday morning. It wasn’t long before it started drizzling…..cold and wet, great start. We were well prepared for the cold, wearing polyprops and carrying extra wet weather gear, including my husbands old swandri which was actually needed quite early on.
Luckily the 20km to the start of the trail was downhill….mostly. Even so, it was about 1 and ½ hours and one flat tyre before we hit the start of the ride. At least it had stopped raining, now it was just cold, in fact I rode the whole ride in more layers than I have ever ridden in before including an alpaca scarf that I bought back from South American and have never worn in NZ before as it makes me too hot.
I loved the general history of the ride and after seeing the terrain close up it was easy to imagine how hard it would have been for the returned servicemen trying to make a go of it on the land. It is also easy to see why the area was abandoned and the bridge ended up going nowhere. Funnily enough the bridge was finally completed after most of the farmers had already walked away from the land. Personally, I would have been interested in the personal stories of the families and would have liked some information boards along the way like on the Timber Trail or Old Coach Rd. There were sign posts with original family names showing where their plots/farms were.
Unfortunately it had rained a lot the week before we rode so there were a lot of mud and puddles, although my husband reckons it would always be wet here. Unfortunately these weren’t just any puddles, they were Taranaki mud puddles, big sucking puddles of grey mud that you felt like you were working twice as hard to peddle through.
Its incredibly rugged land – don’t be fooled like us and think that’s it is ‘only’ a 35km ride. The average riding pace is way slower than usual. The mud combined with the numerous narrow suspension bridges near the end that meant we had to get off our bikes and wheel them on the back wheel to get across, made it really slow going. We also had to stop and clear mud out of our bike deraliers and gears too, poor bike. This meant we were racing to get to the jet boat pick up on time. And we had been worrying about getting cold waiting for the pick up.
I have to admit near the end of the ride the only thing keeping me going was seeing the Bridge and when we got to there it was a quick read of the information boards and some photos before we were on our bikes again as our jet boat was waiting for us.
The 20 minutes jet boat ride out was awesome, if a little chilly and we were pleased that we had packed the hip flask. On essentials list.
Top tips
We rode in Autumn and it was cold, wet and muddy ( and this isn’t any ordinary mud, its Taranaki Mud and that mud sticks like glue) so not sure about doing this ride in winter.
Allow more time than you think you would need on an average trail or you could be rushing for the jet boat like we were. Alternatively, get dropped off by the jet boat and ride back. I would not recommend riding back to Ratehi from the end of the track as it would be a solid 15 km up hill.
