Sharing the Lulz - Beginners Outing at Makara

To add some flavour to the official Bike To Work day on Wednesday, Tiger Keith organised an introduction to the Makara Peak mountain bike park for some cobbers from his place of work/sleep, the Dept Of Trade & Enterprise.

Everyone met up after work at the Makara car park and Bushies, Wonderwoman, Angry and Davo joined in to help exhibit the finery of the Koru and Lazy Fern trails. They were joined by novice keeners; Rachael, Bex, Emma, Mike, Sunil, Richard and Carrie.

Although the trails are designed for beginner level mtbers, the Bushies were slightly nervous and amused to see that Bex had a large town bike with 1 inch semi slicks, and Emma had slicks on her mtb. "Whats the worst that could happen?" they asked themselves. Once the images of rescuing people from underneath their town bicycles had been pushed aside, we headed down the trail and over the bridge onto Koru.

Everyone rode really well especially Bex on her epic 29er machine. She was right up front - Go you good thing! Rachael had a spiffy brand new Trek and she was loving getting it off road too.

We cruised up Koru to the skills area for a play. Davo did some poorly executed 3 inch jumps and many dudes and dudettes had a crack at the see-saw. It was drizzling quite a bit, but this failed to dampen anyone's enthusiasm and the group headed round to Lazy Fern for the epic rampage back to the car park.

Everyone loved Lazy Fern and the switchback corners and once everyone got into the rhythm the damp summer air was filled with 'whoops' and 'woots' as our intrepid new mountain bikers experienced some great downhill singletrack - the real mtber's crack.

We finished off with some banter and feesh and cheeps. A great evening's entertainment.