Lasseters Easter in the Alice

A long weekend can really let you catch up on some time on the bike with mates, getting away from any other hassles that might be bothering you. An Easter long weekend can be even better, with four days off in a row.

The Lasseters Easter in the Alice has tapped into that. A 3 day MTB Stage Race in Alice Springs, it provides brilliant trails, a great event centre, and categories for the whole family. As the race is over Easter, and therefore within school holidays, having time to experience some of the sights of the Northern Territory can be built into a family holiday.

And there’s a lot to do besides ride your bike on the 400km of singletrack that spreads out of Alice Springs. You can go on a high speed quad ride with Outback Quad Adventures, go hot air ballooning to see the sun rise over the MacDonnell Ranges, eat a 3 course dinner prepared in a fire pit, visit numerous indigenous cultural sites, enjoy a camel ride, go on a 4WD tour, play a round of golf… there really is a lot to do.

But the mountain biking that is based out of the old Telegraph Station is now marked and mapped, so it’s not local knowledge only. The Central Australia Rough Riders club and other locals have been building trails over about 15 years, and now some of the main ones have been cleaned up a little, and can be ridden without needing an Alice Springs address to find your way home.

The trails were officially opened on April 14th, and we were racing on April 19th. The race had two stages on Saturday, with a 27km time trial in the morning and then a night race on the same course at 7pm that night. There are few trees to hit at night in Alice, but just about every clump of grass hides sharp rock! Stories of nocturnal punctures and crashes filled the Lasseters conference hall, where the racing started and finished. It turns out finishing a race near a bar is popular with mountain bikers!

A longer 40km stage on Sunday also had an Easter egg hunt around the Telegraph Station for the younger riders, the rest of us just got to hunt singletrack, twisting and turning through the currently green desert, tyres skating over the loose sections and biting on the big lumps of quartz and granite.

Come Monday, and we had 80km to ride (modified distances for the Junior riders though). Starting from the Desert Park, we did a clover leaf around Alice Springs, allowing for five waterpoints to be manned by volunteers with your own bottles, extra water, and Subway cookies – which may have just become a race food of choice. I’ll make no bones about it, Monday was hard. There was a lot of hard singletrack, lots of accelerations out of corners, and just some quality mountain biking.

The Central Australian Rough Riders have put a great event together, and one that is easy to take the whole family along to, considering the packages that Tourism NT are able to put together for flying and accommodation at the moment. And given how good the riding is, how friendly the community is, and what a reprieve Alice Springs is from a wet and cold east coast – I’ll be going back as soon as I can. And at $100 entry, as Race Director John Pyper says “It’s got to be the cheapest stage race in the universe!”

Results can be found here: