Mount Beauty Australia is a Must-Visit for Mountain Biking Trips

If you have only been riding mountain bikes for a handful of years, the small Victorian town of Mount Beauty Australia probably doesn’t mean much to you. A nice day’s pedalling or shuttling on a longer trip to the more established trail towns of Bright and Falls Creek, maybe. An increasing number of Victorian junior downhill racers definitely know it as the most unforgiving race on the state’s calendar. The truth is that mountain biking in Mount Beauty has a rich and interesting history and played a big part in the formative years of our sport in Australia.

Why Visit Mount Beauty Australia?

• Features some of the Victorian High Country’s best singletrack
• Over 40km of singletrack hand built by locals
• Visit local cafes, pubs and breweries
• Make it a road trip: visit Bright, Falls Creek and surrounds

After spending the months following Melbourne’s lockdowns going back and forth, I relocated to Mount Beauty Australia in late Spring of 2022. The access to remote backcountry riding really sealed my desire to live in this little town, and it’s that same sense of exploration and adventure in the mountains that led the original pioneers of Australian mountain biking to firstly seek out and then start building new places to ride in the early 90s. Pioneers like Bernie McArdle.

READ: Top 15 Mountain Bike Parks in Australia 2024

‘The whole area where the trailhead carpark and barbeque area is now, that all used to just be big horse paddocks. We had a little fenced off path we could use to get through onto Pole Track, and we just started exploring from there,’ Bernie says of the origins of riding on Big Hill.

Big Hill is an understatement, really, as far as names for a hill go. When you’re at the trailhead or even in the town of Mount Beauty itself, you’d be forgiven for asking, ‘what hill?’ But head a little further away to the other side of the pondage in the middle of town, and you can see the top. At 1385m, Big Hill sits a little over a thousand metres above town, still 600m shy of Mount Bogong, also visible from town. A long history of hydroelectric infrastructure and cattle grazing on the even higher alpine plains facilitated a network of access roads, logging trails, and bridleways that criss-crossed Big Hill, and these allowed early mountain bikers to find their way higher and higher. Many of these early tracks are still used by riders today.

‘We used to pedal and push up Big Hill Firetrail or the road (Big Hill road still used for shuttle access today) until we got up to the logging road at about a thousand metres. From there, we’d bomb down the firetrail and onto cattle track at the bottom.’

This is a ride I do regularly from my house. On a comfy titanium hardtail with a 130mm Pike and 2.5” rubber, it’s still super rough and loose. I replaced a set of older two-piston XT brakes recently as they just weren’t cutting it on these kinds of regular descents.

‘We used to kill some bikes down there, that’s for sure. You’d be pulling the brakes as hard as you could and not a whole lot would be happening! Once we started getting bikes with suspension, it got a bit easier, but those old forks only really took the edge off the big hits.’

Popular trails at Mount Beauty

• Last Dip
• The Kraken
• Bananarama
• Rolling Stoned
• Wombat’s track
• Gully Track
• Nirvana

‘That was actually one of the good things about starting to build singletrack. It was more fun, but you’d also be going a bit slower and cooking a few less rims.’

READ: The Victorian High Country Road Trip

That original singletrack, for the most part, remains rideable today. If you jump on Trailforks, you can clearly see Big Hill Downhill marked in red amongst the wider Big Hill network. At nearly five and a half kilometres long and dropping six hundred and fifty metres, Big Hill DH is still one of the longest accessible mountain bike-specific descents in Australia. It’s certainly not a highly engineered, machine-built trail like you’ll find in neighbouring destinations in Victoria’s High Country. But if you want to re-live or discover for the first time what early mountain biking was all about, then Big Hill DH and its mix of wide-open doubletrack and rugged, raw singletrack will certainly make for an amazing morning out.

The growth of Australian mountain biking

With the distance and elevation stats I just listed, it’s no wonder that Big Hill DH held some of Australia’s first and most famous downhill races. It’s been a great pleasure to see South Australia’s Volatile Visions recently start adding some of their old footage to social media, but I think my first ever experience of Mount Beauty Australia was probably from a Volatile VHS tape in the late nineties.

‘I dunno if you can write about that stuff,’ Bernie says with a laugh when I ask about the notorious post-race party scene, no doubt instigated by hall of fame-level legends of Australian downhilling. Riders like Chris Kovarik, Scott Sharples, and Michael Ronning honed skills on Big Hill that would take them to factory team rides, World Cup podiums, and install them as role models for future generations of Australian mountain bikers. I’m told they were also VERY well-behaved at the former West Peak Hotel, now Mountain Monk Brewery.

READ: Top 5 Best Victorian High Country Descents

Turns out those future generations of Mount Beauty riders weren’t far behind, and they were real fast.

When I first met Liam Panozzo, I recognized that surname and immediately assumed he was going to be riding at speeds and often at distances from the ground that I was not going to be comfortable trying to match. I feel for the visitor to Mount Beauty that meets Liam out on the trails, gets chatting, and accepts the personable and instantly likable Liam’s friendly offer to show them around. ‘What a fortuitous meeting,’ I imagine them voicing to themselves as they roll onto the violence that is double black diamond Honeysuckle for the first time behind their new friend. Hold on, tourist, you’re about to either get dropped in five seconds, take a helicopter ride, or if you’re lucky and can hold your own, see something amazing!

Liam’s parents, Peter and Bonnie, were part of the original Mount Beauty fraternity, and along with Bernie and others, were the founders of the Team Mount Beauty club we know today. With a growing and challenging trail network on their doorstep and some obvious genetic advantages, the Panozzo children became a force to be reckoned with in the Australian downhill scene and on the world stage. A quick internet browse easily lets you know that older brother Joel rode to 4th at the UCI Downhill World Championships in Les Gets in 2004, after grabbing 6th the year previous in Lugano. It’s also easy to find that Liam got 3rd in the 2005 Junior World Champs in Livigno. What the internet isn’t going to tell you, though, is the best stories from this era.

Mount Beauty today

From Bernie’s and Liam’s stories alone, we could easily do an entire issue of AMB around trails, events, and the associated bikes and gear of the early days of mountain biking in Mount Beauty, and it’d be a great issue. Maybe I’ll pitch it. The short story, though, is that from those early beginnings, the sport and the trail network evolved. A passion for riding built a passion for trail building, as it tends to do in the mountain biker with access to land, tools, and some free time. You can still often see Bernie’s car parked in the upper reaches of the network on a weekday afternoon, no doubt tending to some small feature or another. Work that benefits all who ride Big Hill, locals and visitors alike.

READ: Best Gravel Cycling Routes in the Victorian High Country

I have the good fortune of living less than a hundred metres from the trailhead in Mount Beauty. Weekends are busy with people self-shuttling, especially in the lead-up to events, and there’s a steady stream of riders along the bike path from town in the early morning, heading to the trails for their pre-work fix. You know who I see out riding the most, though? Bernie.

‘I just got this for my 70th birthday, actually,’ Bernie explains of his super sharp new Trek Fuel EXe.

‘It’s been great, and it’s really opened the park up again and let me ride stuff I usually don’t have time for.’ And this stuck with me as a real positive of e-bikes for the health of the trail network.

I’m not an e-bike hater, but I am pretty happy to do a 120km off-road day ride from Mount Beauty up onto the high plains, and I guess there’s never really been too many positives that I could personally place on e-bike ownership for myself.

‘The overall condition of the park is substantially better since e-bikes started becoming more popular,’ says Team Mount Beauty club president Carly Emond.

‘The trail network is huge, and it’s not the kind of trails that were dug with an excavator. People dug them by hand with a shovel and a rake, and without lots of traffic over them, the bush is generally pretty quick to take them back.

‘The uptake of e-mountain bikes has meant that a lot of trails that people would only ride once in a blue moon are now getting ridden much more regularly and staying run in. We’re a small club, and all our trails are built and maintained by volunteers. It’s been kind of interesting to see how much less we’re having to do to some of the less popular trails these days.’

Places to eat at Mount Beauty

Check out Rocky Valley Bikes café for lunch and a milkshake in their beautiful courtyard, or swing into Grass Valley for a fantastic pizza and maybe a cocktail for dinner. There’s also a little bakery in town and often a food truck at one of the breweries.

Places to drink at Mount Beauty

Crank Handle brewery serves great beers and some incredible curly fries in their great courtyard with Mount Bogong Views. Mountain Monk Brewers in the former West Peak hotel has a fantastic sprawling beer garden.

Places to fix your bike at Mount Beauty

Rocky Valley bikes have a small workshop to take care of small repairs, but for major surgery, you’ll need to head to one of the more MTB-oriented stores in Bright. Alpine Outfitters attached to the Mount Beauty post office have a surprisingly great range of Maxxis tyres, tubeless tape, and sealant, as well as gloves, helmets, and ride wear, and are worth a look.