6/10/020

Day 4 - Bidjar Ngoulin Hut

I was looking forward to today's ride to the Bidjar Ngoulin hut, about 35 km south of Dwellingup. I have poked around this area before and the track goes through the Lane Poole Reserve, a state park, and the Marrinup forest. This would be one of the last bits of the Munda Biddi I haven't ridden on (apart from the final stretch from Walpole to Albany - my next ride). I have been told by numerous riders that the Bidjar Ngoulin hut is situated in a particularly lovely location, snug up against a small stream surrounded by forest. 

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I watched a rider coming the other way, crossing the Murray River bridge at the Reserve. He was in a hurry, riding hard, but I got a bit of a wave out of him as he zipped by. I rode a leisurely pace deviating away from the track to pedal the dirt road that followed the river. There were surprisingly few cars on it, given it was still school holidays. In fact, there was less traffic on the road than there was on the Munda Biddi full of school kids and families out enjoying the holiday. After the Lane Poole Reserve, the track veers west following a small tributary of the Murray River until you reach the  side track to the hut. Follow that side track for a few km up another feeder stream to get to the hut. It is a beautiful location. 

I found a couple of bedraggled riders at the hut, one sound asleep on the hard wooden sleeping platform - dead to the world. The other was sitting there, quietly waiting for her to wake up. He told me they were participating in an informal end-to-end  endurance race of the Munda Biddi. They all started in Albany at the southern terminus and were riding, non stop if they could, the entire 1000 km. That rider in a hurry that passed me on the bridge was the race leader, Callum Henderson. He set a new record: three days, sixteen hours and seventeen minutes. He did it without sleep, stopping only to eat, drink and use the loo. 

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I had experienced one of these epic endurance races, the Race to the Rock, in 2017. It was on the very remote Great Central Road, just north of Warakurna, near the WA/NT border. The race leader and eventual winner, Sarah Hammond, had very rudely blown past me with no more than a "sorry, can't stop." I'm still carrying a grudge about that... And then somehow the second place finisher slipped past me, even though there was only one road north and absolutely no way to miss him. I did spend some time talking to the other riders (including Jesse Carlsson) as they limped into Warakurna. Their physical/mental states varied dramatically, from "this is such fun" (Jesse) to "I saw my mother in the middle of the track last night, she's been dead three years..." (the tail-ender who I met three days later wobbling down the GCR).

The race rules stated they all had to carry SPOT GPS locators and visit each of the track huts. Over the next few days, I would meet the rest of the competitors, although none of them were as worn and weary as the 2017 Race to the Rock competitors. Callum didn't have a Sarah/Jesse to chase/pace him on this race; otherwise, I think he would have done it even faster. 

Where Jarrah Grows... 

Jarrah is a magnificent eucalypt. It doesn't grow exceptionally tall and does't look nearly as beautiful/graceful/grand as many of the other eucalyptus species, but the Jarrah forest is spectacular. And Jarrah timber  is one of the most wonderful and valuable forest products on the planet. For many years during Australia's colonisation, Jarrah timber was highly regarded and exported / exploited throughout the British empire. Today, you can still find Jarrah timbered railway trestles, bridges, building structures around the planet. It also makes fantastic furniture... Unfortunately, that also means there is very little, if any, old growth Jarrah forest left in WA. And what remains is under great threat; fore you see, there is a direct symbiotic relationship between Jarrah and bauxite. Where there is Jarrah, there is bauxite. 

Bauxite is refined into Alumina: so basically, Alcoa are transforming Jarrah forest into beer cans. Alcoa will tell you that they are rehabilitating and replanting and everything is just fine. But they literally strip away the forest, dig up the bauxite and then put the dirt back and plant some trees. They do it behind a thin curtain of forest, locking out their mining sites from public view. 

On top of that, the state government (through their aptly named Forest Products Commission) is actively harvesting native timber. In the past, they used to selectively harvest only the bigger, most valuable tress from the forest because it simply wasn't cost effective to clear fell forests. Now, they often clear fell large tracts of Jarrah forest and then replant with other species. So between Alcoa and the FPC, the forests of southwest Western Australia are very quickly disappearing. You don't really notice this when zipping through the region at high speed in your hermetically sealed automobile, but you certainly do when slowly riding through it on your bicycle.