Our dream is to see the beautiful piece of wilderness in the Sainsbury Road area of Mt Pirongia, providing great off-road riding opportunites for the Waikato locals as well as any visitors it may attract to the area. To achieve this our current focus is on creating these trails. This work grinds slowly onwards as our dedicted volunteers chip away at the mammoth task of trail-building, but already the first trails are open. For map and further information of the new trail, as well as updates on more trail-building achievements as they happen, see our Sainsbury page.
We are also fortunate to be quite close to the vast Pureora Forest and some very good riding at Waitomo. Rotorua is a slightly longer drive away from our Waipa towns but is always a great MTB destination and the drive is pleasant and scenic. Many of us ride or race at Hamilton's popular Pukete tracks. There are also plenty of excellent training rides on gravel roads available to us, including some famously tough ones, but of course to get off-road as often as possible, is our true heart's desire.
The Waipa is a country district with peaceful country towns where you would expect to find plenty of good off-road riding close to hand, since there is so much beautiful open countryside around us everywhere. Unfortunately this is not the case as most of that open countryside is privately owned and off-limits.
So there is much work to be done to change the Waipa into a mountainbiker's heaven as surely such a spacious land should be. We must just get busy and work with councils and landowners to see what we can do to make the Waipa a better place for mountain bikers. Mountainbiking has been taking off in the wider Waikato with other local clubs experiencing surges of growth in membership.
We have an obesity epidemic - MTB can help sort that out. We have big need to attract more tourists to the Waipa - MTB can help sort that out. We have climate change - MTB can help sort that out. We have diminishing worldwide reserves of fossil fuels - MTB can help sort that out. In fact there is hardly a world problem you can't solve by jumping on a mountain bike. SO JUST DO IT!!
Haven't got a mountainbike? No need to even leave town to find one. As you would expect in a town which has good reason to think of itself as the nations 'Cycling Capital,' there are excellent bikeshops right here in Te Awamutu.
Find them on our friends page.
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