Scouting part of the Tour Te Waipounamu: a training ride through the Two Thumb range
Just after Christmas, Andrew Trevelyan and Rob Brown set off to practise ‘normalising difficult’ by scouting the Mesopotamia – Tekapo section of the Tour Te Waipounamu bikepacking race. We caught up with Andrew to hear more about the adventure and how his race preparations are going. These photos will whet your appetite for high country riding adventures in the South Island!
“If there’s anything harder on the TTW then give me a consoling pat on the shoulder when you pass me, curled up on the side of the track crying for my mother!” Andrew said after scouting a section of the Tour Te Waipounamu bikepacking race. “The section would have taken about 13 hours if we had stayed on route (avoiding a 1 hour scramble through waist-high matagouri) – and if Rob hadn’t caught the Westpac rescue Chopper to Christchurch hospital!”
Meet Andrew Trevelyan
Andrew has ridden bikes his whole life. “I started riding to and from school as a kid and had an original rigid mountain bike back in the 80’s.” He used to do more multisport adventures and events like the Coast to Coast but stopped paddling as it was harder with family. “Since the mid-1990’s I started focusing on riding as it was easier to do with a young family.”
He’s based in Christchurch, where he works as a communications manager for Otakaro, building post-quake projects to fix up the city in Christchurch. Most of his spare time is spent on a bike and he’s also the Canterbury representative for Kiwi Randonneurs.
When asked about his favourite style of riding, he says “I just like long, slow days. As you get older it’s hard to go fast so it’s nice to go far! I’m 55 now. My kids have just left home and with an understanding wife, I have a lot more time on my hands.”
I asked him about training for the TTW: “I’ve been trying to do a long ride every weekend without getting burnt out.” That means, at least a solid day, depending on the terrain but usually 150km or more. He’s “most focused on overnighters and back-to-back days.”
Last weekend he did a loop from Rangiora over Okuku Pass to Lees Valley and through the Wharfdale to the Sheffield Pie Shop, Malvern Hills and back to Rangiora. “I’d been contacted by Steve Scott, a mate of Rob Brown’s, suggesting we do some overnighters together. It’s not great when a bloke you’ve never ridden with before turns up in an old Tour of Southland top. He’s done five of them!”
He enjoys the camaraderie and challenge of events. He has done most of the South Island Flahute rides and last year he did the Kiwi Brevet, a Kahurangi 500 training mission with a bunch of other keen bikepackers and a lot of overnighters. “With office based work I really like getting away for long rides on the weekends,” he says. In 2020 he tried to shoot a few seconds of footage on most of his more interesting rides… “for when dementia sets in!”
“It’s just basic iPhone footage with naff iMovie music to cover the poor audio and occasional bad language. How fortunate are we to ride in places like this?” Check it out here:
We caught up with Andrew a couple of weeks before the inaugural Tour Te Waipounamu. Enjoy!
Most memorable training ride for the Tour Te Waipounamu?
“That’s easy – the Two Thumbs Range takes the cake! There’s a backstory. I’ve been thinking about whether you can get a bike over stag saddle for a few years now. I was riding in a brevet last year with a hardass guy who had just tramped through there. This was before the Tour Te Waipounamu was announced. He looked at me and said “there’s no way you can take a bike through there!”
Then the TTW route was released – and it included the Two Thumbs. So Andrew and his mate Rob set out to find out how rideable it really was! They left Christchurch in the morning and drove to Mesopotamia Station. It was around 10am when they started the ride.
It starts with a rideable dirt road, on private land, climbing 750m before a nice descent to the start of Bullock Bow Saddle.
The climb to the saddle is steep and long at about 850 vertical metres but at least it’s pushable! “We didn’t ride up to Bullock Bow Saddle at all,” Andrew says. “You’d have to be a machine to ride it – it’s consistently steep, relentless.”
“The descent down from the Bullock Bow saddle was lovely.”
“From the Royal Hut you’re constantly looking across the stream and thinking that the track might be better….then it peters out and gets steep. You really have to manage your head. It’s a push or carry the whole way from the hut.”
“It’s around a 2hr scramble from Royal Hut to Stag Saddle. My backside never touched the saddle. Then it’s a scramble across jagged rocks to a lovely descent down the ridgeline…”
“I’ve spent a bit of time in the high country but this was the hardest day I’ve ever had on a bike…because of the pushing and carrying component.”
After Stag Saddle they “did something silly” – 10+ hours of high country hike-a-biking will do that to most of us! “We were at that point where we were looking for shortcuts – Stag Saddle had been tougher than we thought so we were ready for the day to be over!”
“We were pretty knackered and decided to descend down to Rex Simpson Hut. We thought we could see some good 4WD tracks leading down to the Tekapo ski field access road. Not so. We thought bugger this…let’s just scramble down to the road, thinking there would be old farm tracks. Not so. The next thing we were scrambling through waist-high matagouri bushes for an hour!”
Finally through the most rugged section of the day, they were stoked to reach the road. But at about 11pm, about 15km from Tekapo on the Lilybank Road, Rob “came to grief.” They only had about 15km left to complete the ride along the Lilybank Road into Tekapo – the easiest part of the whole day. “It was around 11pm when Rob came to grief.”
“He came flying down a hill on to Boundary Creek bridge. With a single headlight the whole surface of the bridge looked flat. But there are two raised bits at the sides and a dip in the middle, but you couldn’t see that with one bright light. He veered left and his tyre hit the raised section and he catapulted over the side of the bridge. His bike maybe didn’t even touch the handrail.”
Rob fell around 4-5 metres onto a rocky creek bed, landing on his head and smashing his bike fork.
“I scrambled down to the creekbed expecting compound fractures, major blood loss or worse. He had a very sore neck and couldn’t feel his fingers. Rob’s a volunteer fireman who attends a lot of car accidents and he and the 111 operator arrived at the conclusion that he needed a helicopter at about the same time.”
It’s a long story but by the time a helicopter finally lifted off with Rob it was 1am, two hours after his crash. “We’d been sitting there freezing cold on one of those frosty clear high country nights….a sleeping bag draped over Rob.”
“Rob’s a real hard bastard. He’s been first to finish in a few tough bike events, an ex-British paratrooper and I think he was concealing just how much pain he was in.”
Andrew said he was feeling quite emotional when Rob was finally evacuated by helicopter.
“It’s amazing he doesn’t have more serious injuries. He has a compressed and bruised spine and has to be inactive for a few months.”
Unfortunately Rob will be dot-watching this year’s Tour Te Waipounamu but I’m sure he’ll be back for redemption soon enough!
What’s your bike set-up for the Tour Te Waipounamu?
“I have a really light hardtail, a 9k merida …a 27.5. I’ve got big bike bags but there will be lots of lifting the front wheel over things so I’ll just carry a small front bag. A lot of the time I’ll throw all of my stuff into a backpack and balance my bike on the top of the pack to carry it.”
“It came with a nice Rockshox RS-1 fork and XTR groupset. I’ve fitted a Salsa Bend bar with a comfy 23 degree sweep. I have a Cane Creek Thudbuster short travel suspension seatpost as I find hardtails hard on my tail on rough stuff. I’ll be running big 2.4 inch Mavic trail tyres that are 200grams heavier but hopefully more durable and grippy than my favourite Conti Race Kings. A mix of bags. Etrex for nav with Cyclemaps app for backup.”
“I had this elaborate plan to carry my bike over the Stag Saddle…but after about an hour I was exhausted!”
Do you have any strategies for the race?
“Long and slow days. I’ve booked a flight back from Invercargill after 10 days, but it’s a flexi fare. I might need to pay a couple of hundred dollars to change my flight because of fare differences and as I’m a tightass, I have a goal of getting there in 10 days.” But it’s a complete guess – looking at some of the sections and times on Strava he thinks it could be closer to 12 days. “I’ll just see how it goes.”
“When I finished the two thumbs loop, just biking from Peel Forest to Mesopotamia I had a light NE tailwind but you’re much more likely to have a howling NW headwind for 60kms. Even those sections that seem straightforward could be really tiring.”
Goals for the Tour Te Waipounamu race?
“To remember it with a smile” he says. Although not at the time – the future smiles. “That silly smile you have when you look back on it for the rest of your life – even though there was absolutely no smiling at the time!”
You can follow Andrew’s progress (hopefully avoiding any waist-deep matagouri bashing!) on the MAProgress live tracking map. You can check out the route via that link now but the race (and live tracking) starts on 14th February. During the next two weeks we’ll be sharing some other profiles of people who have been crazy enough to sign up for the Tour Te Waipounamu!
