For reasons beyond my grasp, Hideki had lyrics from a Bon Jovi number taped to his top tube, and was quietly practicing them from time to time. After the ride we dropped in to the Secret Spot to round out a great day together.
]]>Happy New Year!
We hope you have had a good time since our last communication.
Probably the highlight of my summer break was a visit from our son. I showed him around the new trails that have been created since his previous appearance, staying off the especially rowdy ones. He is still recuperating from a jump park disaster almost a year ago. I gave him my deluxe trail cruiser with the added comfort of ultra-modern suspension, and I took the hardtail.
One of the rides gave me the opportunity to test the impact resistance of the 2024 Sifters and the Nzo Merino T.
I established that hitting the deck hard enough to rattle my fillings and perforate my elbow has more or less no effect on these products that a couple of laps in the washing machine won’t fix.
Diving into a beautifully sculpted corner slightly too hot for my skillset, I found the little layer of dry pea gravel with my front tyre, and millivanilliseconds later, my entire carcass.
I didn’t even have time to get any of my appendages off the bike, landing with hands still holding the bars, feet attached to the pedals. Which, it turns out, is the best way to do it. No dislocations or skeletal problems whatsoever. Well, no new ones anyway.
Nathan thought that was skill, but it was actually just sudden circumstance meets slow reactions.
The next bit was actually quite touching: I tried to spring to my feet to demonstrate that I was intact and ready to continue, Nathan made me stay down until I gathered my wits. When I finally did get up, he insisted I stop testing the functionality of my various joints, or at least slow down a bit. The place where I landed had a surface similar to a cheese-grater, so my arm was dripping blood from a few places. One of Nathan’s classy looking socks was employed as a bandage, and he cleaned up the mess that was accumulating on my hand and parts of my bike with his precious death metal t-shirt.
He does know how to look after the old guy.
As mentioned above, the new shorts and t were unharmed. I haven’t tried anything like that on our latest product, a Long Sleeve version of the NzoMerino T, and I don’t plan to. They are made of the same fabric, in the same local factory, so lets just assume you can slide along the ground wearing one and only suffer a little indignity.
The socks and the Metallica T washed up good as. I was going to say new but that T is definitely vintage.
]]>
Hi there
Another year is about to disappear over the horizon, and we are looking forward to the next one.
It has taken most of this year to get a new version of our favourite all-purpose shorts to market, and get a few more lined up for the New Year.
Whatever it is about Nzo that appeals to people who become our customers, the durability of our products seems to figure in it.
It is hard for us to be objective. I ride my bike as much as I can, but I am often trying out new stuff. I have old stuff which has certainly seen a hard life, but it isn’t the same as somebody who has had two pairs of Dobies on rotation since 2003. So we can’t say hand-on-heart whether our products are genuinely exceptionally durable, or whether our schtick appeals to people who like to use a product for a long time, and only replace it when it is completely worn out.
Either way, we think it’s great that people might still be using a product they bought from us twenty years ago.
As many people have said to us, that isn’t necessarily a great business model if your product is about the same price as a trolley full of groceries. Or these days, half-full.
And if you have been reading these things for a while, you have probably figured out by now we are not really about flogging stuff for the sake of it. We try to make good products that are fit for purpose, and sell them to people who need them.
Now, we are not going to ask you to go out and badger your friends into buying Nzo stuff. Although, obviously we don’t mind if you do. We don’t want to start looking like a multi-level marketing scheme though, so go easy there.
What we do know, after years of fiddling with the controls, is that this very newsletter you are currently wading through is the best vehicle we have devised so far for creating eventual customers.
Here is the bottom line: for Nzo to still be a thing whenever the time comes to replace your favourite piece of kit, having new subscribers to our newsletter will help us stay alive.
Getting people to actually agree to receiving yet another bloody email is devilishy difficult, but once the right kind of people sign up, we find you stay signed up for years. And some of you buy stuff.
We think you are the right kind of people, and you will know the right kind of people.
So that is why we are asking you to share.
This newsletter is not our pick for one to send to your mates, so the link below directs your friends to a vintage one that is now on Nzoland. The next newsletter might be more interesting, can’t tell yet, but it will have the share link too.
Meanwhile, have a safe and happy festive season. Ride bikes. See you in 2024.
Note: the numbers they dish out these days to carry the timing chip doofer must be wrapped and stuck to itself to make a little flag-like device. The whole shebang is designed for modern carbon framed beasts. So it will wrap around a thing the size of streamlined shoebox with room to spare. Fitting one to a thing as classy as an NJS approved Nitto seatpost requires a bit of cunning, a pair of scissors, and a little patience if the number is to flap around in the wind and not attach itself to the leg hair I am sporting these days.
There are lots of cool things about bicycles.
I am probably preaching to the choir, but bikes are really amazing things if you take the time to think about it.
Last Saturday was a case in point. Both in how amazing bikes are, and taking time to think about them.
As I reported in a previous newsletter, I entered the ‘fun-ride’ around Lake Taupo for what I think was the 23rd time.
The ride itself was standard fare, as far as I am concerned. Got unloaded almost immediately by the group I started with. I take about half an hour to get going, by which time I had been swallowed up by a later group. Rode with them until the lights went out, proceeded to the finish in splendid isolation.
The segment of the ride that saw me unexpectedly run out of commitment was flat.
I say unexpectedly because usually if I have problems keeping up there will be hills involved. On Saturday the hills (and there were many) were not an issue, but when the road turned northwards into the final leg along the eastern lake shore there was a howling tailwind.
In short order the bunch was in a long single file, and moving at about 50 kph.
Whatever I needed to have done to be ready to go that sort of speed for any distance was missing from my preparation. After about twenty kilometres of discomfort a few gaps opened up and the front half of the group were disappearing up the road at a pace that was beyond anybody in the back half to follow. At that point I resolved to cruise to the finish.
Once I stopped concentrating on the bike directly ahead of me I had time to think about bicycles in a more general way. The bike that was a machine of torture at the speed required to stay in my bunch had turned into a marvellously comfortable companion for those last thirty ks or so.
With the howling tailwind factored in, my cruising speed with barely any real effort was not that far south of race pace. My thoughts were various: how remarkably nice it was to travel at a more civilised pace, and whether I should ride directly to a cafe from the finish line, and what might I eat when I get there.
After 160 kilometres I was considering how pleasant it was to be out, and the menu for lunch.
That demonstrates to me what a fine thing a bicycle is.
Me, in splendid isolation, enjoying a more postman-like pace
Know somebody who will like the Nzo Newsletter? Share this story by email here.]]>This weekend, for the first time in a few years, I am going to ride around Lake Taupo. Covid and cancer got in the way of a 22 year run broken only once, when a sort of dance mishap resulted in a toenail being peeled off. Couldn't get a shoe on, sidelined that year.
For most of those laps I have ridden my Benson road bike, built by my friend David Benson in his Onehunga temple of bicycling. It has undergone a few changes over the years, but a surprising amount of the parts are still there from its original assembly in 1998.
The frame of course, repainted a few times. Still a marvel in terms of comfort and handling. And it looks awesome.
Besides consumables, most of the running gear has been hanging on this bike since new, with the exception of the rims and the rear derailleur. Something broke in the original and we replaced it with one from a similar period.
Advancing years and a neck that is not as flexible as it was before it was irradiated have forced a change to a more upright position - shallower bars and a different stem work well. Not as pretty as the steel Salsa stem that used to grace the front end of the bike, but I can ride in the drops and still see more or less where I am going.
I haven't ridden anywhere near Saturday's distance in a long time, so I am grateful the frame allows big tyres to be fitted - running 60psi the thing feels like a featherbed, even on the gnarly rough chip seal we make our roads out of down this way.
There are two spare tubes, tyre levers and a pump in that coffee bean bag under the saddle - I am hoping that carrying plenty of spares will stave off needing to use any.
The weather for the weekend looks atrocious.
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This morning I spotted a story about the Pearl Pass Tour, in Crested Butte, Colorado. It took me back to 1989, the first time I went mountain biking in America. I landed in San Francisco because I had some mates who lived there. I had a rough itinerary for a month or so and I was definitely in the market for a bike. The variety on offer was mind-boggling compared to what we could get back home.
The old hippy area of Haight - Ashbury at the top end of Golden Gate Park had a heap of interesting bike shops, and I spent a happy couple of hours taking laps of the area on various bikes trying to decide what to buy, and trying to avoid buying any dope.
I ended up with a Ritchey, which I carried over my shoulder as I was ferried back to my mate’s place by my friend Casey on his Harley.
The Ritchey Ascent Comp. More or less state-of-the-1989-art. Note frame bag suitable for shoulder portages, full size frame pump, 3 chainrings, toeclips.
In those far-off days, before the internet, I didn’t have many clues about where to take my bike besides Mount Tam in Marin County. We did that, and then I boxed my new sled up and put it on a bus to Colorado. I left for a lap of the states that would eventually see me collect my bike from the Greyhound Depot in Denver. I had seen an article in Bicycling magazine about Moab, Utah, and another about Crested Butte in Colorado. So that is where I went.
Moab was as far from riding up OneTree Hill or fanging around in Riverhead Forest as you can get on this planet. I camped in my rental mini-van at the SlickRock Trail carpark, there were two other guys camping up there and we teamed up for a couple of days of riding trails that defied belief, especially considering our bikes had no suspension and fairly primitive rim brakes.
2am, SlickRock Trail. This guy's name is Michael Jackson, true story.
We rode SlickRock several times, including one lap after midnight under a full moon. No lights, just following the white painted dots on the rock that mark the trail. I have been back there on a modern trail bike and the idea of Porcupine Rim solo on a rigid hardtail with cantilever brakes (a 70 kilometre round trip I took from the SlickRock carpark before I hooked up with the other guys) frankly terrifies me in retrospect. I guess I didn’t know any better at the time.
The startline crowd, Pearl Pass Tour 1989.
Crested Butte was allegedly among the first places besides San Francisco to become a hotbed of mountain biking, and when I got there I blundered by sheer chance into one of the very early mountain biking ‘events’ - the Pearl Pass Tour. According to local legend, a bunch of motorcyclists from swanky Aspen had ridden over the 12,700ft Pearl Pass and made nuisances of themselves in the much more bohemian CB. The following year a bunch of Crested Butteans took bicycles over the same pass, and raised hell in Aspen before riding back. These were not mountain bikes, they were just whatever piles of crap that the people riding them had laying around. None of the people were what you would call a mountain biker - at the time there was no such thing. But there were mountains. And bikes. And putting them together was a lot of fun, plus it really annoyed the wealthy residents of Aspen so they kept doing it on an annual basis.
Sometime between the first one and the twelfth edition I lucked on to, a Californian contingent got wind of the Pearl Pass Tour, and went out to take a look. Among them were some real godfathers (and mothers) of mountain biking - Joe Breeze, Charlie Kelly, Wendy Cragge and Gary Fisher.
Two local brothers, Don and Steve Cook, were very serious cross country skiers. As soon as they saw the bikes the Californians had, they knew what they would be spending their summers doing. The day before the Tour was a guided group ride, Don was guiding. I got to see his downhill style on a bike with flared drop bars, and a bike that was really a proto ‘gravel’ beast, decades ahead of its time.
Me ready to go. I have the mother of all bum bags on, to cart my gigantic camera around. That makes it look like my t shirt was tucked into my lycra shorts. It wasn't.
Check out the width of those bars. That is how we rolled.
That Pearl Pass Tour was a good example of what mountain biking was about back then - a ride up a 4wd road that got steadily worse the closer we got the the actual pass, where about 60 us stood en masse for photos before starting the long descent. Everybody else dropped in to Aspen for hooliganism, I had to leave that afternoon, so I rattled back down the way we had come and made it back to CB in one piece.
It was really a just very gnarly gravel ride, and my new Ritchey handled it majestically. I wish I could have hung on to that bike, but it got stolen off the back of our Kombi in Los Angeles, on another voyage, in another story.
]]>Literally, the hook hanging under a helicopter.
Kaimanawa Alpine Adventures is launching an unforgettable new back-country experience from their base off the Desert Road south of Turangi.
Last weekend a dozen lucky riders took the trip, and everybody agreed it was one of the highlights of their mountain biking careers.
The project has been a long time coming: Thomas Orr from Helisika is the Project Manager (and one of the pilots) and he is excited that this new venture opens up some incredible private land to recreational users. Work started on the idea five years ago, with Pete McFarland from Bike Taupo developing the trail through the Beech forest.
Besides the incredible scenery and the excitement of a helicopter uplift, the thing that sets this ride apart is the trail. Richie Caudwell is the man behind my favourite trail in the home patch: Tihi-O-Tawa. He and a team have spent a lot of the last 18 months creating a magic line down the range, half of it on the moonscape above the treeline, and the balance in the forest further down.
The first stop for discussion... the trail can be seen descending the peak in the background
From shattered rock on the tops, to sandy ash on other sections, to the deep cornflakes of the Beech forest below, it all flowed like butter.
Every section required a pause to let what we had just done sink in, and every time somebody said wow, wish I could ride that again, right now!
The expanse of country on display from the tops is mind-boggling. We were very fortunate to get an absolute bluebird day, with huge views of Ruapehu, Tongariro and Ngauruhoe across the desert, Taupo to the north and endless ranges to the east and south.
Even though the ride drops something like 800m over the 22 kilometres of trail, it also climbs 400m so it is a decent ride. The transport of bikes is done with a custom built portage system that can handle 6 bikes, including e-bikes.
The variety of surfaces and terrain is amazing, and after a couple of hours traversing the alpine section we dropped into the forest.
That piece is unbelievable: beautiful and largely untouched mountain Beech trees are a wonder for sure, but the best feature is the deep layer of loamy leaf litter on a trail with what felt like hundreds of corners, every one primed and ready for two-wheel drifts.
It goes on and on, and is the cherry on the top of an amazing day out.
The ride itself is accessible to anybody with intermediate skills - it is a genuine Grade 3 trail all the way. There are some exposed places, but they are well signposted and the design of the trail means you can ride at your own pace.
This experience is unique in the North Island, and must rival any ride, anywhere. I am lucky enough to have ridden in a lot of places, and this is now right at the top of my list of great days on the bike. Epic is a word that gets used a lot, but on this occasion it fits.
I am hanging out to do it again.
]]>This is a story by Gaz@Nzo for New Zealand Mountain Biker mag from a trip we did in September 2020. Republished here because somebody asked about it.
Picton is a town most people like passing through.
As the ferry terminal for the South Island, travel in either direction involves Picton. If you are a lucky Northerner arriving in the South Island, it is a sort of welcome sign that flashes past as soon as you can hit the road out. You might spend a couple of hours there on the way back, but if you are anything like us you will be exhausted, and in a kind of funk about having to head back to normality.
That’s why the idea of being based in Picton while sampling some of the region’s iconic trails piqued our curiosity.
Located at the head of Queen Charlotte Sound, the town is small enough to feel crowded almost into the water by the surrounding bush, but large enough to support a great variety of accommodation, transport, and eating options.
Our base was the excellent Picton Yacht Club Hotel, a thirty second freewheel from the docks.
After getting bikes organised we strolled across the road to the Irish Pub – with the big ride we had ahead of us the next day we didn’t say no to anything offered, and everything we tried was great. The ginger cake on the dessert menu is a definite must.
Picton is the traditional hopping-off point for the Queen Charlotte Track. Scratched out of the tough terrain in the early 80s, based on sections of historic trails, the Track was opened to walkers in 1983. Keeping a track that is 71 kilometres long in operational condition was beyond the capabilities of the determined people that instigated it, but with the formation of the Department of Conservation in 1987 and a big effort involving people from DoC and the Air Force, the Track was cleared and improved and has been a favourite ever since.
Open to bikes except for a section that closes over the height of summer, the Queen Charlotte was a shoe-in to the National Cycleway project. Unlike many trails developed since, Queen Charlotte was not built for bikes, and that is what makes it so unique as a bike ride. More on that later!
The real attraction of this trail, and what sets it apart from any other, is its marine aspect. You travel to the northern start point by boat, it’s the only way to get there - a scenic jaunt from Picton that takes about an hour. You step off the boat in the solitude and spectacle of Ship Cove / Meretoto, the hills ringing with birdsong. This was the first place where face-to-face interaction took place between Maori and European in the Sounds, when James Cook landed here in 1770. He visited five times between 1770 and his last voyage in 1777, and the Cove remains much the same as it was in his day.
Many people choose to use the other unique feature of Queen Charlotte – a fine selection of accommodation literally en route. Riders can have their gear ferried to many stops along the trail, and make the ride last two or three days with no need to be weighed down with baggage. That is what we did on a previous expedition, and it was a really good way to do it – another special feature is that anybody who doesn’t want to ride a section, or in fact any of the trail at all, can go by boat, and be located in a deckchair with a wine and a book by the time the riders come along.
On this outing, we took a different tack, and based ourselves at the Yacht Club for the duration. There are solid arguments in favour of either approach, but the upside of a fixed base is the opportunity to let your kit explode across a room, and only have to round it all up again once. As we had two days to do Queen Charlotte, and a third day to ride the legendary Nydia Bay Track, the fixed base won out. The bonus was a couple of extra boat rides, and spectacular dinners at Picton.
Our first day was pegged to be a 51 km effort from Ship Cove to Torea Bay. We had breakfast in the Hotel, and then did that freewheel to the waiting ferry. We were riding state-of-the-current-art trail rigs – Liam on board a Pivot, myself on an Ibis Mojo, and Cam, weighed down with tons of camera gear, had a Cannondale e-Bike.
The boat had a very nice roof-rack with space enough for heaps of bikes, ours as well as some bikes belonging to friends we had along for surprise company – Kylie and Matty were out for a day ride before heading further south. There was space for several more.
Cam McKenzie, the photographer, and Liam Friary, the publisher.
The start of Queen Charlotte Track at Ship Cove is stunning. There is ancient forest, clear water under the jetty, and on this day, a certain trepidation on my part about the first part of the route. On our previous mission, the first climb was very hard. It went straight up, and was almost impossible to ride. To my relief, the track has had some major upgrades, and the new line is a textbook example of how to get to a pretty decent height without too much pain.
The trail switchbacks its way up through the forest and there are some good outlooks along the way, before the climb tops out at 237m and a long view toward the rest of the ride. Diving off the saddle there is a really nice section of very fast and wide open trail down almost to sea level in a couple of kilometres, before the climb to the next saddle gets underway. The trail is classic back-country mountain biking, getting to some prodigious heights for big views, and hugging the coastline through small settlements accessible only by water.
The excellent lunch we packed from the Gusto Cafe in Picton was inhaled on a rocky little beach, nobody else around, a very Aotearoa moment.
The Sounds is an amazing place to be – every piece of land seems impossibly steep, and shore is so convoluted that the Sounds contain 20% of New Zealand’s total coastline. Every high point presents another aspect of that complex geography.
It is after the climb to Kenepuru Saddle that the trail starts to be a grind. Following the ridge gives many opportunities to look out across the Sounds, but it also results in some very steep climbs. Still, among the relentless, almost unrideable ascents were some neat little sections of downhill. The final descent to Torea Bay and the surreal experience of rolling on to a jetty where a ferry waited was a fitting end to the day’s ride.
A quick trip back to Picton, and we were straight into the bar of the Oxley Hotel, bikes in a pile on the footpath outside. We refreshed ourselves, then headed back to our digs for a welcome shower. The Oxley was that night’s choice for dinner – another winner.
The boat ride the next morning was back to Torea Bay, to complete the Track with what looked like an easy sort of effort, only about 19 kilometres.
That little beach down there is where we got off the boat. Heinous climb.
We knew the day would start with a grunt, we had rolled down a pretty decent section of tarmac from the trail to the waiting boat the day before. And a grunt it was – followed by a climb that was truly epic. The combined tarmac and trail ascent gets riders to 407m, according to the sign at the top, in about 2.5 kilometres. You can peer almost straight down on the jetty where you started. That sort of caper continues for quite a way, and it makes things tough. The effects of the previous day’s ride were still there, and there is no chance to pedal your legs into shape. You are either committing completely to anaerobic bursts, or walking on the climbs, and freewheeling on the downs. All that effort was rewarded with a spectacular view from the day’s second high point, and a very exciting switchback descent on rocky trail to a road crossing.
The relatively mellow ride from there to Anakiwa was made more interesting by the clock, we were running late; and by the e-Bike, which for the second day had run low on power at the pointy end of things. Where the first day’s battery outage was softened by a mostly downhill finish, the run to Anakiwa was rolling trail with plenty of ups. The section from Mistletoe Bay to Anikiwa was through very beautiful beech forest close to the sea, and would have been nice to dawdle along. Instead we rode it at the best pace we could muster, and got to a slightly miffed ferry pilot about 20 minutes behind schedule. And then had to wait for the unfortunate e-Biker, who sprinted down the jetty five minutes later. Luckily Cam is a strong bike rider, so the lack of battery power was funny at the time. For somebody else, running out of e-power could be a disaster.
A long discussion over beers at the Oxley ensued – how to recommend the Queen Charlotte to bike-riders? Moving on to the excellent if slightly rustic Jolly Roger Cafe the discussion continued at dinner. We reckoned all of it would pay back reasonably fit and able mountain bikers in spades – every section has something to put a smile on your dial. We also decided that the new wave of mountain bikers jumping into the sport, especially the ones on e-bikes, should read the notes on the QC carefully before planning their trip. Even though there are plenty of places to get off the trail by boat, big sections of it are hard, and remote.
The gem is definitely Ship Cove to Camp Bay, and that is the part that is closed to bikes during summer: December 1 to the end of February. The rest of the trail would be fairly brutal on a hot summer day, and you would miss the best part during the height of summer. We reckoned a shoulder season foray would be best.
Nydia Bay Trail. One of the absolute highpoints of my 40 years of mountain biking.
The last day of our Marlborough adventure was to be an assault on Nydia Bay. This trail has been talked about for decades, and even raced in the NZEnduro. How I had managed to miss out on it until now is a mystery, but my time had finally come. The weather forecast was fairly worrying, but the day dawned bright and clear, so we headed out early for Havelock. With a stop at the Bakeriij in Picton for the all-important food supplies.
The drive to Havelock behind us, we met up with the very helpful Kelly from Destination Marlborough, who would drop us at the trailhead and then drive around to Kaiuma Bay to retrieve us. That is an aspect of the Nydia Bay ride that needs to be factored in, if you want to take in the entire 27 kilometres in a single serve. There are shuttles available from Havelock.
We decided to add in the Opouri Bridle Track, so Kelly delivered us to the Opouri Saddle and we dropped straight into some of the best trail you will find, anywhere. Benched into steep terrain, the Bridle Track drops over 530m in about 5 kilometres, so it is nearly all downhill but never very steep. Towering Beech forest at the top gives way to more jungly growth at the bottom, with huge Rimus, Matai and Miro supporting an amazing variety of undergrowth.
The trail is all rideable, but not by me. The consequences of failing on some sections would not be good, and we were on a day-long mission we wanted to complete intact. Having said that, on the Bridle Track there were only a few spots that needed a quick dab or a dismount, and most of it was ridiculous fun.
The arrival at Duncan Bay, where the road ends, is an anticlimax: the trail pops out directly on to the road, which meanders along the shoreline to a jetty, and the start of the Nydia Bay Track proper.
While we were checking out the jetty, an older gent was delivered to the trailhead by car. He set off walking. We passed him fairly soon, and we exchanged greetings. He finished by calling “see you at the roots”. Must be a Marlborough thing, we thought, and motored along the first section of the trail.
The trail climbs gently, hugging the coast and offering up views of the water all the way. We stopped at a random spot that seemed timely to eat half of the slab of carrot cake we were carrying, but otherwise wasted no time. There were a few root snaggles along the way, but pretty soon the trail tipped upwards and the real fun started.
The Nydia Bay Track is a nicely benched trail on a very climbeable grade – but every so often it presents a very interesting challenge. It might be a tangle of roots snaking across the line, the biggest ones standing high enough that unless you are really moving they are going to stop you. And off to the left it could be a sheer drop. So you stop. The next little heart-stopper might be a rocky outcrop that has resisted the trail builder, and has since crumbled away a bit. If you were going downhill, you would easily make the high line, but you’re not. And you might stall, and once again, the downside of the trail is a vacuum to your left. So you tripod over it, or dismount and walk a few paces.
Intermittent watercourses traverse the trail, some are dry and can be crashed through, some are running with clear water, are steep sided, and slippery as eels. We would stop, clamber, maybe take some photos.
On about our third stoppage we realised the old boy on foot was catching us. He stayed on our heels for the entire climb. We would gap him when there was an extended section that was easy going, but he would close up again when we were busy with the camera, or doing more clambering than riding.
The other thing we found ourselves doing a lot, which definitely slowed our progress, was staring awestruck at our surroundings. The forest on the section from Duncan Bay to Nydia Bay is spectacular. The views out from the forest are equally jawdropping, and the common theme as we tried to discuss what we were seeing was how fortunate we felt to be there. Yes, we were mountain biking, so it’s all good. But the venue was very special, and the freedom we enjoy to get out into places like this is what makes being a kiwi such a privilege.
Anyway, about a kilometre shy of the top of the climb, our pedestrian partner walked past us, and wandered off ahead. We had a good catch up with him when he was on his way back down, and he sketched out a lifestyle that was as enviable as it was unique. Live at the end of a remote road, take a trip to a small town every three weeks or so. Set a net every so often to keep the table in fresh fish. And take the odd walk up to the ridge for a look around. Seemed like a retirement plan.
From the ridge to the sea at Nydia Bay must be about as much fun as you can have on a mountain bike, as long as you watch where you are going.
It is possible to ride most of the ‘maybe’ bits with the momentum of going downhill on your side, and cackling to yourself while you clatter down a tricky but rideable section unscathed is a rare pleasure. Except when it isn’t rideable, and those bits come along without warning, see above about watching where you are going. Cam would go ahead to scope out photography opportunities, and sometimes station himself so he could catch us as we came along. I saw his head and shoulders over the crown of the trail ahead, and looked at him for a poofteenth of a second too long. Just enough time for my front wheel to drop off the trail, which I got a close look at a split second later. It was a funny crash, no harm done, made funnier by the fact that Cam hadn’t stopped for a photo op, he had also upended himself. But seriously folks, pay attention. When you go and ride this trail, and you really should, you don’t want to crash. It is a long way from anywhere much, and there are a lot of pointy rocks under your wheels.
We dropped in to Nydia Bay at the same time as the rain that was forecast, and we were glad to have completed the descent in relatively dry conditions. Pristine forest gave way to scrappy pine forest, with every piece of machinery that has ever come in by boat, and then worn out, still laying around.
Simple little houses were dotted among the trees, and the trail became muddy and almost swampy in spots. At Nydia Bay Lodge we pulled off the track to have a look and a bite of lunch. The Lodge managers were in residence, although the Lodge was a month or so from opening for summer. They were keen for a chat, and brewed us a coffee which was a welcome treat.
We sat in the verandah and watched the rain, chewing over the day so far, as well as our sandwiches. We reckoned anybody who relished riding a difficult trail would love Nydia Bay track, but anybody at all would enjoy walking in for a stay at the lodge, and the walk back out out again the same way.
An out-and-back bike ride would also be a goer, with a bit more hike-a-bike on the return trip, but an easier descent to finish, and no need for a shuttle.
For us though, we were heading up another climb, now in a howling gale and sideways rain. The climb through farmland and up to Kaiuma Saddle is actually higher than Nydia by a few metres, but it’s a lot less difficult. So is the descent – it is not easy, but it is not as gnarly as Nydia, even in the rain. That weird transition from native forest to plantation pine always amazes – it is like being transplanted to a different planet. The trail surface changed from weather beaten rock and tree roots to cushioned orange pine needles and we dropped the final few kilometres into a valley and across a stream before a last fairly brutal climb.
The last downhill was wide open, an easy run down to the Kaiuma Bay road, and Kelly in a waiting car, complete with a change of clothes and a warm dry interior.
Havelock put on hors d’ouvres at the Mussel Pot, and the bike trip was done.
We were all pretty pasted by this time. Over 100kms of unfamiliar trails, saving the toughest for last, and a solid 4000m of climbing, made for three long but incredibly rewarding days.
Marlborough had turned on a varied and top quality selection of mountain biking, and Picton had become a new favourite New Zealand town. The top of the south has a heap more trails to offer, and we were all thinking about the next visit before we had even departed.
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Here is a snapshot of what separates us from the normal people.
By ‘us’ I mean people who ride bikes - doesn’t matter for now what kind or where we go - and by normal people I mean that grey horde living sad, meaningless existences without bikes.
OK that is probably a bit much. Dial that back to people who have yet to discover bikes.
I connected with a mate from Queensland for a lap of the local.
Nearing the top of a tedious climb there is an intersection with an even more tedious climb. Hauling his carcass up the last few metres of that ascent was Craig, whose back story is here.
We gathered at the top of the hill to compare notes. Craig had just returned from a trip to the USA, so we reminisced about trails we had both ridden, learned about other stuff he had ridden, and pondered the general differences between Colorado high country and our little joint.
We then moved on to ‘in other news’, and that is when things became weird.
Craig was attempting to complete the course planned for the upcoming Whaka 100.
The Whaka 100 is a hideous experience that I can not recommend highly enough, it is a must-do for anybody who likes very long and difficult days in the saddle. I may do it again sometime, but then again, maybe not. Nowadays there is an even less attractive option that has people lining up to enter: a 160km version that I can comfortably say will never be a thing, for me anyway.
But back to Craig.
It turns out he did the 100 last year, and finished it (an achievement in itself). He had planned to improve his time this year, with all that recent high-altitude gas in the tank.
Then life got in the way.
His success at building pump tracks was carrying him off to a foreign land for a month. A month that straddles the Whaka weekend.
A normal person would take that as a sign, and count themselves lucky to have dodged that date with lactic overload. But then I guess a normal person (see above) would not be on the start list in the first place.
But Craig is one of ‘us’. So here he was, on a sunny Friday, when he could have been mowing the lawn, or painting something, or just sitting around waiting for lunch, riding 100 kilometres of trail with nobody watching. The only witness to this mammoth effort was his own conscience.
We rode together briefly to the top of Gunna Gotta, where I foolishly let him go first. I had forgotten how fast he is down a hill, so by the time I popped out he was disappearing into the trees a few hundred metres up the road. We didn’t cross paths again that day, but I did get a message late that night.
“103km. 8.5hrs. Still alive”
Faith in our version of humanity renewed.
]]>Every so often we discuss how to turn a regular old outing in your local hang-out into something more memorable.
Well, here’s another way we discovered over the extended weekend: the Staycation.
Many moons ago, we wrote a newsletter about a lovely couple from Australia who bailed out of their deluxe beachside digs to get some more volcanic plateau dirt beneath their wheels.
That was several Nzo website rebuilds and dozens of newsletters ago, so I dug through the archives and retrieved that story in full for anybody interested.
It took a lot longer then any of us expected, but Naomi and Paul made it back to Rotorua with their mate Jo, to do some skids and show her the rides they had been talking about for almost a decade.
They have been doing lots of bike riding in the meantime, but their Dobies are still looking more or less pristine after nearly eight years of use.
It was great to have them back, and even better to show them around some of the stuff that is new since their last visit. We put together a couple of rides in the trails that hit a few new highlights, and revisited the Timber Trail in the Pureora Forest.
Riding three days in a row made the project feel like a holiday. Riding with visitors means stopping to look at stuff, yakking about various things, and taking twice as long as normal to get the trails ticked off.
That didn’t leave a lot of time for the usual ‘life’ stuff we fit around our bike rides, so I didn’t do anything else much for a couple of days.
Hence the title of this missive: the Staycation.
Having a bike riding holiday at home is highly recommended. If you can swing it, there are many benefits to the idea.
You don’t have to pack. Your accommodation is sorted. You are already paying for insurance. There is almost no chance you will lose your bike on the way to the riding venue.
Just find somebody excited about riding somewhere near you and pretend you have just arrived yourself.
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Here is a little test to help you feel better about your obsession with mountain bikes. Give an average couple the choice between three nights in a deluxe apartment with a balcony overlooking a popular east coast beach, or three nights in a cramped economy motel unit in Rotorua. To make the test more interesting, tell them that part of the deal is that no matter which option they go for, they will have to pay for the beachside apartment. Decision takes about half a second longer than it takes for the couple to understand the question, right? While they go and look for their beach towels and hefty paperbacks, ask the same question of a couple who are both mountain bikers. To up the ante, find a couple who have only three days left in New Zealand before they head back to Sydney. That is obviously ridiculous, a couple like that will be hard to find. So we found one for you. Naomi and Paul were visiting Rotorua for the second time. We met up in the Nzo shop last weekend, and got out for a ride together the next day. After filling their boots in a five day stint in the Whakarewarewa Forest, they hived off to their beachfront mansion to ride the Motu trails and generally kick back on coastal time. After their ride (excellent) and a snack, they started thinking about the long days of seaside relaxation stretching out before them, and the endless ribbons of dirt an hour inland, which they might not see again for a while. There were a few minutes of discussion, then they packed up their stuff and headed back over the range, checking into the first cheap motel they could find on the RotoVegas strip. We got a text saying we’re back! Any chance of a ride? We convoyed to Pureora, had a great ride, and then hooked into Kerosene Creek for a hot soak on the way home. So, was paying for an empty beachside apartment AND a bedroom in Vegas a good investment? Ask Naomi and Paul, the next time they are here. We don't think it will be long before they’re back. |
Part one: Mid-ride, mid-shower, mid-life; take your pick. An idea pops into being.
It gets drawn on whatever comes to hand, in the sort of short hand usually used by doctors.
Part two: If it kicks around in the flotsam under the computer for long enough, and doesn’t get used for making a grocery list or a gear calculation, it gets rendered up.
Part three: A simulation of the art is made, on a photograph of a product. From there it goes on to the website, hoping to be ordered by somebody and get out into the world.
The exceptionally lucky ones get printed in some sort of bulk, which on our planet is still a very small batch, and hung in a shop. Note I wrote ‘a shop’. Not ‘lots of shops’.
These methods of distribution make it extremely unlikely that there will be two such designs at the same location, unless you are in Rotorua, where there could be two or three.
The chances of somebody stealing your hubcaps while wearing an Nzo t shirt are almost nil: few criminals go online to order t shirts from a brand they have never heard of. Because of this, if you do spot an Nzo t shirt in the wild, you can be pretty sure the wearer is a bike rider.
Part four: Life as a t shirt! Most people will keep a fresh Nzo t shirt on rotation among their semi-sorted ensembles for at least a dozen wearings. Some will go bike riding in them, which will work almost as well as high tech synthetics, and at maybe even work on par with pricier natural fibres. This activity will hasten the progress of the shirt along its path to heirloom status.
At some point the shirt will become a thing that has more of its owner’s life story invested in it than your average item, and even though it is now misshapen and maybe perforated by misuse, it will resist any urge to be thrown in the bin.
Partners will start to comment on it, not always kindly.
Eventually, its owner will realise that an adult professional has no business wearing a t shirt with holes in it, faded to eighty percent of its original lustre, and carrying blood stains from that time it was used to make a temporary sling.
Part five: The afterlife. Cutting a t shirt up for bike cleaning purposes extends its useful life by months, if not years. You can pin the part with the print on the wall in the office, or workshop. You can use most of the remainder to mop up excess oil or buff your frame. The rib collar and reinforced shoulder seams are good things for cleaning cassettes.
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A couple of weeks ago the stars aligned and I added two new bikes to the stable at once.
By a combination of circumstances that are best left unexplored, I stepped up to a brand new trail bike. Part of that exciting transaction was keeping all of my previous trail bike except the frame.
As many of you will understand, there are more bikes in my shed already than I really have time to use. Each is suited to a particular purpose, and there is surprisingly little redundancy across the fleet. Some of them get out several times a week, some of them might hang there for months, waiting for the day when what they are useful for is what I am going to have a crack at.
So with that in mind, a sensible person would turn the pile of pretty nice parts into cash via some sort of online marketplace.
That is what I set out to do, honest.
My first step was to browse around, trying to establish a value for all this stuff.
There were similar parts with prices ranging from depressingly low to delusionally high.
And there were a lot of things available. I started thinking about the sheer tedium of listing everything, communicating with tyre-kickers, and then trying to send a pair of wheels to Invercargill.
Wondering if anybody would want the entire pile, and because I have a short attention span, I wandered over to the ‘frames’ department on the off chance there might be some path to follow there.
The very first thing I saw was a brand-new hardtail, my size, and completely compatible with everything in my parts trove except the bottom bracket. Plus, it was steel, which made it cool and very desirable.
A short but fierce mental argument followed. I bet you have endured similar battles. One part of my brain was of the opinion that a seat tube diameter matching my functional but virtually worthless dropper post was a sign from heaven, and I should immediately buy the frame before anybody else did. Another part kept chiming in with the various things I could do with my winnings if I carried on with the original plan and ditched the parts. The first part came back with the very sound reasoning that if I acquired the frame, built it up, and then fell on hard times, a complete bike would be easier to sell than a pile of parts, and there would nothing left over except a rear shock. Which would be left over anyway, and can be sold. It might even pay for the required bottom bracket.
The ‘buy the frame’ faction had the upper hand, but the other side somewhat lamely countered with a comment about the number of bikes already in the shed, pointing out how rarely some of them escape into the wild.
That was fairly easy to ignore, we are well practiced in doing exactly that.
The final straw was somebody asking a question about the frame while I was looking at it.
I never found out what the question was, and didn’t wait for the answer. I hit ‘Buy Now’ and moved into the post-purchase second-guessing period.
The excitement of the new possession was far more powerful than the slowly fading doubts, and soon enough the frame turned up and the parts were bolted on.
The bike came out even better than Mr Positive Brain imagined, and the naysaying lame-o in the negative has not been heard of much since, except for a brief appearance the first time we took the new beast into the trails.
A sort of ‘see? I told you this was a dumb idea’ popped out on the first bit of fast, choppy trail, as my body tried to adjust to life with no rear suspension. How we rode places like Moab, Utah on a rigid hardtail is beyond my ability to recollect, but we did, and I have doggedly continued to try to do so.
I am not really getting any closer to floating over the ground like I should, and rides on the new dually are certainly much easier on the joints and fillings. But me and my mental go-for-it are still very happy we went for it.
Nothing like a different bike to make a ride fresh and new.
Published with permission from New Zealand Mountain Biker magazine
]]>Usually we get into a long and complicated discussion about trails - that subject provides plenty of material for hours of slow climbing, which is when most of the talking gets done.
This time though, we gave the trails a rest and got into a session about the culture of the sport, and what is happening to it.
First of all, what were we talking about? Is there a mountain bike culture?
There are possibly dozens. It certainly isn’t one thing. Under the general umbrella of ‘mountain biking’ there are trail riders, downhillers, cross country racers, and adventure-style expedition riders. We could tack on some sorts of bike packing. Dirt jumping. Single speeding. Klunking.
Parsing things further, within ‘trail riding’ there are people who shuttle, people who don’t, people who stick to the beaten track and people who like to roll their own lines.
Downhilling includes some of the shuttlers, and the full-on racers. Cross country has casual types training for an event and people aiming at the Olympics.
Single speeding can be a low-budget way of protecting the flash bike from the worst of winter wear, or a semi-religion.
And a further complication is that many people will be in more than one camp. Most people I know are, and many of them do other bike stuff besides ‘mountain biking’. Gravel. Road. BMX. Track. Cross.
But let’s say there is a mountain biking culture. Let’s, for argument’s sake, bung everybody we have listed above into a broad category and call them mountain bikers. Are they homogenous enough to call a culture?
What got us started on this topic was turning up at an area where people sometimes congregate, and stopping to fill our bottles. While we were there, a posse of e-bikers arrived. They were all on e-mountain bikes, pretty slick ones. They had the basic gear required, they all had fit-for-purpose shoes, shorts, backpacks, gloves, etc. So far, so good.
They also had hi-vis raincoats. All five of them. In the forest, where they don’t need to be seen and it wasn’t raining. All their seats were too low, and all their gears were too high. Well, too low and too high for anybody who knows what they are doing. Saddle height and correct gear selection don’t matter much if you have an extra couple of hundred watts on tap, so they weren’t doing anything ‘wrong’.
It just didn’t look ‘right’.
The sight of this gang made both of us happy - they were out in the woods, on bikes, having fun.
It also made us raise our eyebrows, and wonder what it meant for the ‘culture’.
The reality is probably nothing.
In past years, people got into the sport as individuals, and identified with one or other of the subcultures. They learned the unwritten rules, and adopted the appropriate gear. By the time they had developed enough to find their niche, they really fit their niche.
People who are getting into it the last few years are doing it in droves - little gangs of people appear to have taken up bike riding en masse - the posse of e-bikers that sparked up our discussion were all on the same brand of bike, all on the same model year. They had their own culture, which they had created themselves. They didn’t pay any attention to us, or even say hello. They were doing their own thing, in their own funny-looking way.
A couple of days later I was sitting in the doorway of my van, and a woman nearby was racking her bike for her trip home. She had a big e-bike, and she was a tiny woman. I offered to help, but she reckoned she had racked her bike many times and proceeded to do it quickly and efficiently.
We got chatting. This woman was the leader of three bike groups from over at the coast. One of them comes ‘mountain biking’ on a weekly basis. There are enough of that group that they split into smaller pods for their lap of the woods. I got to see a few more members of her crew, the fast bunch who go further than the beginners or what she called ‘the pedal bike group’.
They were all very similar: late-model high-end e-bikes, all looking slightly odd to my eye. Even the ones that had the basic layout looking the business had been accessorised with things no ‘mountain biker’ would add to a trail bike, e or otherwise. Carriers. Phone holders. Odd mudguards. They wore odd riding outfits - but oddly consistent.
Much as downhillers look different to XC riders, this new mob look different again. But among their own, they fit.
They are another mountain biking faction, not sure what to call them yet.
]]>Method 1: Get a new bike. Nothing creates the feeling of being twelve better than swinging your leg over a bike for the first time, and riding it around the carpark outside the shop. That is a pricey way to get the pre-adolescent vibe, but hot rodding your existing sled is almost as effective.
That can range from a new frame for your excess parts to hang on, to a new set of grips, with any number of other dress-ups in between. Jumping aboard for an experimental fang up and down the driveway will make decades drop off your internal clock instantly.
Method 2: Go for an actual ride on the new bike. Or the hot-rodded one. Even if the modifications are minimal, you can convince yourself that corners are somehow more satisfying, jumps are floatier, drops are … well, droppier. The feeling can be maintained for a gratifying distance, especially if you make motorbike noises while you ride.
Method 3: Wear this t shirt. Initially intended for a kids downhill event, the Comic Book version of our Eagle vs Shark t shirt has proved popular enough among adults that we keep re-printing it.
The way this shirt will impact your behaviour is different from person to person, but it has proven to be strangely empowering. It even works if worn under business attire. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself thrown out of your next staff meeting for telling your colleagues what you really think.
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A recent Nzo newsletter (you really should subscribe) referenced a review produced for NZ Mountain Biker magazine. A flurry of responses from readers asked what the bike was we had reviewed. By permission of the magazine, here is what we wrote:
2022 TREK RAIL 9.8
I am not privy to the think tank in the centre of Trek Bikes, so what follows is pure guesswork, but here goes:
Nearly two decades ago, Trek broke ranks and named their flagship trail bike after the top category of that very American petrolhead sport of drag racing.
From its very beginnings in the 1940s, the simple competition between two vehicles over a standing start quarter mile has been a technical arms race. And the first thing those early hot ridders did to get an advantage over the guy in the other lane was to figure out how to use something more volatile than pump petrol in the engine.
The stuff they focused on is nitromethane, and various amounts of it definitely makes more horsepower. Mixed with a number of other ingredients to make engines start reliably and not tear themselves apart immediately, nitro was called the poor man’s supercharger. Then they added superchargers, and squeezed phenomenal power out of a V8 motor.
To differentiate the entrants running on regular petrol from the engines running on anything else, a category was added to racing classes called ‘Fuel’.
If there was any doubt that Trek was referring to nitro when they named the Fuel line, they dispelled that by adding a model called Top Fuel a few years later: that is the name of the blue ribbon event of drag racing, the fastest, most explosive, and most specialised class of the sport.
The first dragsters were simple contraptions, usually a 1930s Ford with the body removed and the engine set back toward the rear of the vehicle, and some sort of crude accommodation for the driver, aft of the engine. Because the main members of the chassis were frame rails, the cars become known as ‘rails’. As things got more sophisticated, and custom made machines were fabricated from lightweight tubing, the name stuck. The fastest things on a drag strip were rails.
When Trek launched its flagship e-bike, they slapped the name Rail on the top tube, further cementing my belief that any other possible meaning associated with the name could be ignored: it was another tip of the hat to the dragsters.
The latest incarnation of the Trek Rail is the third iteration of a simple design, based on the time-proven system shared by the Fuel and the Slash. Like its four-wheeled namesake, the design is fairly brutal and unapologetic. No attempt is made to hide the Bosch power plant, and the Rail 9.8’s massive 750 watt battery is an obvious part of the bike’s architecture, not really hidden in the gargantuan down tube. Its an obvious e-bike, and wears its heart on its sleeve.
To further connect the bike to the hotrod DNA, it has a sparkly metallic ‘prismatic’ paint job and big decals that look like chrome.
Out of the box the 9.8 has an epic set-up. A full carbon frame offers 150mm travel and that is teamed up with a RockShox Zeb fork providing 160mm travel up front. It comes with a tough Bontrager 29 inch wheelset that stayed true and gave no trouble over a three month review period where I clocked up over 1100kms on the bike. It is possible to mulletise the bike with the assistance of a Trek dealer to make the necessary adjustments to the Bosch system for correct speed readings and power output. Mostly Bontrager components wear a full set of Shimano XT shifters, drivetrain and brakes.
Geometry is aimed at going fast on trails: a head angle of 64.2 degrees in the low setting of the adjustable rear suspension flip chip Trek calls a ‘Mino-Link’, and a longish frame reach of 45.2 cm.
The Bosch Performance CX Line motor has a reputation for reliability, and on the trail it was surprisingly quiet compared to other e bikes I have shared rides with. The Bosch motor does emit a fair amount of clatter on downhills.
The details are nicely handled, a removable battery has a pop-out handle for carrying it indoors for charging, or to keep it safe while your sled is hanging on the back of the truck. You can access the internal cable routing while the battery is out. The bike has a neat little flap over a charging port on the seat tube, so you can charge it while the battery is installed.
Charging takes quite a few hours from low to full charge, but that is worth the wait once you get on the trail. The battery is a seriously well-endowed source of grunt.
Last year I was lucky enough to produce a NZ Mountain Biker review of the Trek Fuel EX e, and I was amazed by how much I liked the e-assist. I reckoned the Fuel EX e was the ideal bike for a mountain biker, with a bit of fitness and experience, looking to go a bit further or squeeze more trail out of a busy schedule. Now I can directly compare the EX e to the Rail, and I think that holds true.
The Rail can take anybody to the top of just about any climb with comparative ease. But put it in the hands of a rider with a bit of fitness and experience, and riding it becomes a different sport.
The brute power of the bike is amazing. I found myself looking for very steep things to ride up. At 85nm of torque it isn’t the most powerful bike available, but I am not sure more power would be much use - it’s fun figuring out how to dole out the horses without overcooking the available traction.
The range of the bike is equally impressive. My last outing before the sad day that I had to hand it back was a case in point.
I rode 62.6kms, climbed almost 2000m, and averaged over 20k/hr. Most of that was on trails. There is no way I would have chosen the route I took on my pedal bike, and if I did I would have been out for a very long time.
The Bosch Smart System which the 9.8 shares with the XTR 9.9 Model is a slick and feature-packed interface with the bike’s power system. A clear readout panel sits on the top tube. A neat little cluster of buttons sits out by the left grip, with on/off on top of the cluster, two buttons for moving through the display options, an ‘ok’ button which also acts as a scrolling button for the display screen, and two buttons for choosing the power mode. In addition, the control cluster has a colour-coded LED graphic that lets you know what power mode you are in. More on that later!
There is a lot of information available via the display.
The first screen shows battery percentage, power mode and current speed.
Toggle the selector through the screens and you get similar info in more detail: larger readout of battery level, distance covered this ride, distance remaining at current power mode, current and average speed, current and average cadence, and much more.
The system integrates with an app available for a more modern phone than the vintage iPhone I was using at the time of the review, so I can’t say how that works. Based on how slick the system is in use I expect it is good.
The modes of power available on the 9.8 are the same as the rest of the Trek Rail line. You have Eco, Tour, Emtb, and Turbo. In my dozens of rides aboard the Rail I can’t say I ever used Eco. I am sure it would be useful for something, when that mode is selected the range claim is over 100 kilometres. But seriously, folks, this thing is an e bike, so why not E the snot out of it?
The ride I mentioned earlier that covered a good chunk of my local patch and included some very hard climbing was completed in Emtb all the way.
Emtb is the sweet spot. It is intuitive, an attempt by Bosch to determine what the rider is trying to do, dishing out power as optimally as the onboard computing can deliver. Like the other modes, it measures the watts the rider is putting in and multiples them, but it also responds to short and extreme bursts by continuing to supply power if the rider backs off briefly, making short work of tricky root sections on steep climbs. Once a rider becomes accustomed to this delivery of extra power it is really useful for conquering technical climbs.
I tried Tour from time to time on rides, and note that the assist is similar to Emtb but gentler, and the range is increased. Turbo is full power, but Emtb has the same power when you need it and just feels better and more natural.
The extra weight of the bike is only really apparent when lifting it into the van, or if it ends up on top of you, which I confess happened to us a few times. On the trail, the e-assist easily overcomes the 23.4kilograms of heft, and I think the extra weight down low makes going downhill on the bike a lot of fun.
The suspension design of the bike teams up with the RockShox dampers to deliver a well-balanced ride. The Zeb fork is a good partner for a big bike like the Rail, with stiff 38mm legs keeping the front wheel going where you point it. The custom tuned Super Deluxe shock out back has a thrust-shaft design that provides a very supple feel.
The generally downhill oriented geometry of the bike makes hauling ass a lot of fun on any trail, and I was surprised how often I came up against the only minor riding niggle I experienced with the Rail. It is speed-limited at 32kph for the New Zealand market. At that speed the power simply stops being delivered. On the EX e that speed-limiting factor was easy to ignore because the power system is disengaged from the pedal power of the bike. The Rail has a different approach, so when the motor stops assisting, you are driving the motor with the pedals. Goes from punching you forward to feeling like a real drag on the pedals, instantly.
The Rail is a bike that I liked immediately, and grew to like even more as the test period extended. Because the bike was in the shed, and I knew at some point it wouldn’t be, I rode it almost exclusively. Switching back to the pedal bike was tough, because the power of the Rail is so front-and-centre of the ride experience. Getting used to the speed of the bike on all sorts of terrain made getting aboard a plain old mountain bike feel very slow and drab.
A couple of rides on the regular bike removed that feeling, and all was well with the world, but the rides that are on tap with the Rail make a strong case for having one in the rack. And a Rail is very affordable compared to a dragster.
Photos: Savanna Guet
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This week we slapped together a clip featuring a fraction of the t shirt graphics we have had the fun of producing over the last quarter century.
Fossicking through the folders for a quick selection was fun, but also enlightening. We thought we had most of the back catalogue available in our side project over at the NzoPrintShop, but we found many designs we had forgotten about or simply overlooked when we were making that on-demand print site active.
There were also designs we recalled but couldn’t find… that is a project for a future exploration into several boxes of CDs. Relics from the days before cheap hard drives, CDs still hold many precious memories. If we can find the correct one, which is a long shot.
Meanwhile, the designs we did unearth: ElFlamo. This was one of the first prints we offered in the Nzo proto shop, when we called ourselves N-Zone. Our collaborator Jonny Clark, alias The InkDoctor, is one the best screen printers we have ever met. In the early days, we would do the artwork by hand, and Jonny would make the film required for his screen-making and produce the Ts, in ridiculously small batches. We must have been his main nuisance customer, but he never refused a job.
ElFlamo, it was pointed out by some bright spark at the time, could be read as NZ on E. That was pertinent at the time because the chemical entertainer thay called Ecstasy had just landed in our happy little South Seas paradise. Not that we knew anything about that. Ecstacy for us was in the forest at the edge of town. But still, hee hee. 25 years later it could refer to electric mountain bikes, so we have made this design live again for a limited time. ElFlamo will be discontinued in May 2048. Technology has allowed us to offer the back catalogue in the way we do because printing one-at-a-time we don’t have to commit to printing any up front. That was not the case when we came up with designs like this one, and ordering a pile of them was always slightly terrifying. What if nobody likes it? That type of worry meant some designs never saw the light of day. With good reason, probably. Check the selection below. Two were printed, one survives today |
This week marks the 25th Anniversary of the day Nzo opened for business.
More or less.
There is always plenty of wiggle room in discussions about when we got started, because we actually started thinking about something along the lines of Nzo when were wandering around the planet during the early nineties.
We got around to doing something about it in about 1995, when we created a pile of ideas we thought would be good for mountain biking. No real ‘style’ for mountain bikers had evolved at that time, and we thought bike gear with a looser fit than what roadies wore with a range of prints that had nothing to do with bikes was the right approach. We made some samples and kept thinking.
A few years went by, we got busy with other activities, but eventually we decided that the time was right. Circumstances allowed us to relocate to Rotorua. We figured this little town would be a great place to be when mountain biking really took off (it is).
We moved in late 1997. We got the keys to a shop and office around that time, but we couldn’t actually open until we had made a pile of products.
That took until May. It was not that simple: Glen had developed a range of products but we needed more machines, and some people to operate them.
We also needed to design and build a shop.
What we ended up with by the time we opened the doors included the bones of the range we still offer: gear you can live in, that is also good to wear for bike rides.
The other day I went on a group ride with a gang of locals, most of whom I was meeting for the first time. Half of the gathering were wearing Nzo shorts. One of the wearers asked me what got us started on the Nzo project, and I really struggled to explain it.
We were halfway up a long and tricky singletrack climb, which might have had something to do with how difficult it was to provide an answer.
In reality is is hard to recall exactly what we were thinking. For sure, what we were doing before Nzo was a lot simpler. Creating a product and supplying it reliably at a profit turns out to be devilishly complex, and not always even possible.
And yet, we still get a bang out of a new thing that turned out how we had hoped, or a new pile of a trusted and much repeated design that maintains the standards we aim at.
Our sport has grown and changed so much in the Nzo quarter century that it is barely recognisable, but at bedrock it is exactly the same. Having fun on bikes.
And that provides a neat answer to the question about what got us started, and also what keeps us going: we want to help people like you have fun on bikes.
]]>Dobies, in my book, are simply the best shorts on the planet.
I got my first (and so far only) pair about 7 years ago. N-Zone was a new startup company apparently more aligned to sifting about Zippy Central cafe than making a buck out of bikes.
It's great to see that the sift mentality can co-exist with making a buck, and that the Dobie is now the default bike short for those in the know. But let's focus on our story...I'm pretty sure my pair are #4 or #5. Back then N-Zone was an exclusive little boutique, catering for locals and the odd Aucklander who stumbled into town.
The local N-Zone mafia rode, played and drunk too much coffee together, and new goods were tried out on crash test dummies on the doorstep trails in the Redwoods - it's great to see little has changed.
You can spot old-school Dobies: they have been washed so many times the canvas is nearly white. The labels are unreadable or like mine, have fallen off entirely after years of abuse and high-speed application to terra firma. The pocket has a velcro flap. There will be frayed edges around the hem, from countless rides. In contrast, the black N-Zonium stretch fabric will look like absolutely new, and the chamois will too. Basically, they age like good jeans: lived-in, functional, street cred and comfy.
What have my Dobies done? They have outlasted 3 bikes. They have been worn to work all day for 4 years straight. They have been to America, where their minimal cool design and quality made converts all over. They have been tramping, swimming, climbing, flying, driving...they are the pinnacle of cycle couture - desirable, functional, uber-stylish and plain old-fashioned quality.The elastic waistband usually does the job, but when things get really exciting, the drawcord can be done up to ensure you & your Dobies are not parted. The pocket is just right for the phone & sunnies. The chamois...never needed more, never wanted less. On a bike it's just right, off a bike you don't know it's there. The fit lets you move around the bike without any hangups, yet you don't freak out the crowd when ordering a flat white.
Does this sound like love? Is it wrong to love a pair of shorts? Paula has been around as long as my Dobies, and I love them both dearly. I'd hate to ever have to choose between them, because either way I'd loose something indescribable.
Dobies rule. Here's to the next 7 years.
]]>Mountain biking is a sport where some of the people who do it provide the facilities.
Most other sports use places created for the purpose by authorities, or they operate in nature.
Since not long after bikes grew knobby tyres, people have been crafting trails to satisfy their particular requirement.
Over the decades, a lot of that trail development has slid across to be nearer to the “sportsground” model, with government and councils chipping in to support the activities, providing funding, amenities, and sometimes a nuisance factor. There are now professional trailbuilders, but they are still mountain bikers doing the literal hard yards when it comes to the dirt itself.
Some of the original scratchings in the woods have been hugely beneficial to towns nearby for a long time before they started to get some support for their development and upkeep.
A good example is Craters of the Moon just north of Taupo. We have been riding there since the 1980s, and it has always had a special flavour we like. To be honest, I can’t comment on the exact relationships that have allowed Craters to have flourished, but I bet they are complex. There is a pretty cool thermal attraction (like, steaming pits of boiling water and mud) that lends the area its name, and the mountain bike trails wrap around it. The area is also a plantation forest, and is right next to a very plush golf resort. The access point hub that has been developed on State Highway 1 has a very nice carpark, trails that lead to and from town on both sides of the Waikato River, and a cafe that also hosts helicopter flights.
Like I say, complex.
Somehow Bike Taupo, the people behind mountain biking in the Taupo region, got permission and wrangled an underpass to get riders from the hub to the trails on the other side of the main road.
It is an impressive piece of work, as is the network of trails it leads to.
The park got flattened in the recent cyclone, and is now closed.
That is a small and relatively unimportant tragedy in a week of absolute disaster for thousands of people around the country.
They reckon it will take about six months to re-open. It will be a long time before the trail people can start rehabilitating the trails - there is a heap of forestry work needs doing first.
But they will get to it, and they will re-open.
And then they will go and ride it.
]]>
During a short spell between cyclones, we went over to the coast to do a few errands.
I had a spare half hour so I went to the sat in a cafe to watch a heated altercation.
I was not the only one - about ten cafes in a row were fairly full of layabouts like myself, sitting outdoors, facing the street and the beach beyond.
A food delivery truck was pulled up in front of the cafe strip, and a road cyclist was parked in front of the truck, yelling his head off.
The food delivery truck was parked in the cycle lane.
Unless you get extremely lucky, there isn’t anywhere else within cooee to park anything, let alone a delivery truck that needs to make a delivery.
Cycle lanes are great, we all agree. Unless they run along the back of diagonal car parks, fizzle out whenever the road gets dangerous: places like pedestrian crossing choke points and roundabouts, or prevent the delivery of the things required to make a coffee and a date scone, for example. This particular lane features all those flaws, but as it is also on a flat and scenic promenade, it is well used by cyclists. Although not, I suspect, to actually get anywhere. It’s just a nice ride, and there are cafes.
The cyclist who was yelling at the truck was actually parked facing the wrong way, having taken the trouble to move himself there so he could remonstrate with the truckie.
The driver appeared, making placatory gestures, and obviously explaining quietly that he had a delivery to make and how else was he supposed to do it.
The cyclist was still yelling, I think for the benefit of the audience, that the truck and its driver should move, right now, using a word that rhymes with duck and is a personal favourite of my own.
This went on for an excruciatingly long time.
Eventually the truck moved on, clearing the way for cyclist to proceed along the wrong side of the road.
There was a large round of applause from the gallery, and at that point it was hard to discern where the onlookers’ sympathies were placed.
Then the cyclist turned himself around 180 degrees, and headed along the same route as the truck, and he received a hearty round of clapping, but also boos, catcalls, and abuse from the cheap seats.
OK, the truck should not have been parked in the cycle lane. But then, the cycle lane should maybe not be in the loading zone.
But whatever, the way our representative (he was on a bike, and so are we, and we are all ‘bloody cyclists’ to some people) handled the situation did not win us any friends.
To my relief, the cyclist chose to represent a global corporation with his bicycle and apparel choices, not having the wit to outfit himself from a local business that offers things like this and this. Or even this.
What do you reckon? Take our quick survey and vent with us!
]]>We currently share a house with my very inspiring brother-in-law. He is 84, and right now he is training for a South Island bike trip he has signed up for. In general he is one of the more positive people I have ever met, but he is also given to being glass-half-empty on certain subjects.
The weather, for example. Most mornings we retire to our corners and browse the news over coffee. I will say “nice day!”. He will invariably respond with something along the lines of “yeah, but there are showers forecast for this afternoon”.
Today we were in complete agreement. Try as I might to find a decent forecast, they all said we will get varying degrees of crap for the next week. I spotted a brief respite next Tuesday, but the site my bro was looking at said yeah, nah, rain.
Yesterday afternoon was pretty good, and I should have gone for a ride, but like an idiot I stayed in and paid bills. Now it looks like bike riding is off the menu unless I harden up, which seems unlikely.
Still, I can always look out the window and recall sun drenched rides like the two I had last weekend.
We had a tentative go at acting like summer was loaded properly, and went glamping in our little caravan. Lazed around, went for rides, and read an entire book in one gulp, which is the best way to read a book. Picking a book of the correct length for the time away can be a challenge, but this time I nailed it.
We parked up next the start of the Great Lake Trail, a network of pleasant enough trail along the northern reaches of Lake Taupo.
The trail is not challenging, but it is scenic, and does go a long way. It is possible to get about 70 kilometres out of it, and that includes passing through a little town twice. Which means ice cream, or coffee, or a selection of other fuels.
The only thing that can be a negative is the popularity of the thing, coupled with it’s dual use, two-way setup. Walkers, runners, and a phenomenally varied range of bikers can use the trail, and all of it can be used in any direction.
I had many pleasant encounters, a couple of scary ones, and one that went like this:
Steaming along a flattish section, the trail well camouflaged with foliage, I met a large German coming the other way at speed. We both threw out the anchors in time to avoid a collision, stopped with front wheels almost side-by-side, and both fell over into the aforementioned foliage, landing almost face-to-face.
It has been said that Germans have a strange sense of humour, or even none at all, but this one could see the funny side of the situation.
I was just glad to have been paying attention, and glad that the German was too.
You know how it is, expect the best but be prepared for the Wurst.
]]>Elsewhere in this very magazine (er, blog), I wrote a piece about my time aboard the Trek EX e, my first extended period atop an electric-assist machine.
I finished by saying “when I get one”.
Going trail riding on the e-bike is ridiculous fun. The e-assist can provide the buzz of riding a mountain bike fast almost anywhere. The speed available on a flattish trail makes the chore of climbing to the top of a downhill run almost unnecessary. And of course, if you do want a downhill run or three, they are easier to get to.
Surely that is what we look for when we go mountain biking?
It is hard to express exactly why we ride. Sometimes it is for that endorphin payoff available when a difficult task is performed as well as we can do it. Everybody has their own little envelope of bike riding ability, and being out there in the woods doing your best is part of why we go out. The desire to do that more often, to make more of your bike time inhabiting that zone is what has driven the whole phenomenon of shuttling, and for that matter, adding electricity.
A pile of watts that can’t be delivered personally gets us more of that sweet spot we look for.
Well, maybe.
Meanwhile, the Luddite in me has been quietly niggling away in the back of my mind.
I really like the simplicity of basic bikes. I like steel frames, five of the six rideable bikes in my stable are ferrous. I like bikes I can work on myself, which means they have to be simple. I can dismantle and reassemble any of my steel bikes without needing assistance or therapy afterwards.
My carbon, fully-suspended mountain bike with hydraulic brakes and tubeless tyres is bristling with things I don’t feel qualified to mess around with. Yes, I know, these are personal shortcomings I could address, but adding electronics, several batteries and a motor won’t help.
I like going out on my bike with no fixed plan, and riding until I can’t. Having a digital readout on the top tube telling me how much range I have left is a different experience. After a dozen rides I have figured out how much of the battery is required to get me up various hills, in various power modes. Because I know my patch pretty well, I can wring the thing dry most rides. I took great pleasure in arriving home with the readout showing less than ten percent. Several times it was two, and on one occasion, one. How that would work out in unknown territory is something I have yet to experience.
Part of bike riding is also sort of masochistic. People say that getting fitter doesn’t make things easier, just faster. I like to feel how I feel… hard to explain to the outsider, but getting to a particular part of a certain ride and feeling slightly less discomfort than the previous episode in that place is a good thing. Adding an external power source doesn’t remove that possibility, but it makes it harder to judge.
Maybe that is the niggling thought I have. When I am on the E, hooning up the climbing section of the jungle trail that is my favourite five kilometres in our local patch, the most accurate description of what I am feeling is probably guilt.
Like, this should be harder. I can make it harder, by buttoning down the power. But I don’t, because the power is what makes this section with the diagonal roots across the trail so much fun.
And leaving the power setting on high makes me feel both good and bad at the same time.
PUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION FROM NEW ZEALAND MOUNTAIN BIKER Magazine.
Author: Gaz @ Nzo / Photos: Savanna Guet
This is a review of the Trek Fuel EXe, a great example of a new category of mountain bike.
It will not be like any review you have read before. To be honest, there is not much point in rattling off the geometry, the parts spec, the wattage and the torque figures. Anybody who is remotely interested in this bike has already watched a dozen in-depth videos, and people moderately interested probably know more about the kit that comes on each model than I do.
The exact version I got to test is not even available in New Zealand, so I am not going to pick that apart in much detail either.
What I am going to try to do is relate how this bike has affected me, and what it has meant to my bike riding. My last year or so has been so weird and life-changing that I have been planning to write a story about it, and this bike has come along at the right time to get me started.
Some context: I took up mountain biking almost 40 years ago. I had taken a few years off bike riding after I threw in the towel on my track racing career, and got sidetracked by learning to be a designer. I didn’t really miss bike riding until I saw my first mountain bike. I bought the first one I saw that was for sale.
Since then I have slowly worked my way through many kinds of bike riding. Six-week bike packing trips, cross country races, downhill enduros, a short stint on a BMX, over 20 laps of Lake Taupo on various road bikes, single speed races, 24 hour races, multi-day mountain biking expeditions - I even ended up back on a velodrome.
I have always been able to ride enough that if any of the above activities came along I could select the appropriate bike and have a go at it. Even as I got older, fitness was never a consideration - I could get away with going on any of these outings without any need to prepare.
2020 was one of my best years since bike riding once again became my thing. A weekly fang on the track bike, an unusually mild winter for mountain biking, some great days out on the gravel bike, then two trips to the South Island for long weekends riding legendary trails in great company.
Come February that summer, a swelling in my neck became a major health problem. I was very lucky - what I had was treatable. The treatment was pretty heinous.
So this story is about what it means to be a bike rider who is fairly capable, rendered completely incapable in order to stay around.
Treatment lasted seven weeks, plus another six or seven in a bit of a mess, and as many months in a much reduced state. On the plus side, I got down to what was my 1977 racing weight. On the down side I was weak as a kitten and needed to sleep a lot.
I started back on regular food about a month after treatment, and got the last of the tubes that were installed taken out a couple of weeks or so later. I had my first bike ride post-illness about then, and managed ten slow kilometres on the flat. With some half-hearted wheelies and skids.
Over the next few months I got better at bike rides, got busy on some landscaping projects, and tried to remember what I do for a living.
My specialist, to whom I owe the success of the treatment he designed, happened by chance to also be a mad-keen bike rider. Bizarrely, he ordered a product from our online business the day before our first clinic, quite by coincidence. He understood what I would be trying to do when I got back into it. He encouraged me, with a round of cautions. Don’t expect too much, you won’t be like you were before, and get yourself an e-bike.
I sort of listened, but mainly figured if I ate a lot and was patient I would get back to normal eventually.
I didn’t get an e-bike.
I slowly added kilometres to my distance covered and metres to my altitude climbed. By six months out I could do a decent three hour ride in the trails, and climb up to the best bits under my own steam several times in a ride. I was probably back to being ok for my age, regardless of being in recovery. So, pretty good.
My problem was a ride like the one described would lay me out for several days. I might not get back on a bike until midweek, if at all. My old coach used to say “a little, and often” was the best formula. I didn’t follow that adage, I went out and did the ride I really wanted to do, smashed myself, then took days to get over it.
That was my status when I got the chance to do a long-term review of the new Trek Fuel EX e.
Getting acquainted with the bike was very easy - my daily ride is a Fuel EX from 2021. The e-sled shares that DNA, and is a logical development of a model that has been around in the Trek range for seventeen years.
It looks really good. Whether you like the look of a bike is obviously a matter of personal taste, and for me it is one of the best looking mountain bikes of any kind, ever. The design of the full-carbon frame is considered and resolved. That it is electric assist is irrelevant, it is a good looking thing.
The initial thrust of the bike industry’s e-bike thinking was to give riders heaps of grunt over a long day out. Like, if we want to sell any of these things we have to make them go as far as any of our customers will ever go, even if they only go that far once a year.
Well, OK. But that means riding a big, heavy beast on all your outings. The Fuel EXe weighs in around six or seven kilograms less than its full power brethren, and the electrics are packed into a much smaller part of the bike.
The motor and electronics from German robotics company TQ fit into a slightly enlarged bottom bracket casing, and under a neat little display buried in the top tube. A discreet pair of switches next to the left grip controls the system.
Whether it matters or not to the general populace, it doesn’t look like an e-bike.
On my first ride I met some people I know at the top of the trails, about to head into the jungle. One of them came and had a good look at the bike, which certainly is attention-grabbing with its one piece carbon bar and stem, honeyed butter-coloured frame and electronic gizmos on the suspension and valves. We chatted about it. We rode more or less together to the first junction on the trail. Later that day I posted a photo and a few notes on Instagram and my friend messaged to say he had not even realised the bike was an E.
The other thing that really stands out on the EX e is the noise it doesn’t make. If you are used to hearing what sounds like a blow dryer coming up the trail, you will be surprised by the silence of this bike. Honestly, I struggle to hear it over my tinnitus.
It does emit a bit of a whine when it is really under load, but even that is usually smothered by tyre noise and heavy breathing.
Which brings me to next part of my story - what the Fuel EX e is like to ride.
It feels like my regular Fuel EX. The motor is not engaged with the cranks when it isn’t driving, so riding the bike around with the system turned off just feels like a normal bike. In factory default settings, the Low power mode feels like a normal bike might feel to Anton Cooper. The way the power comes on is very subtle, almost imperceptible, you just feel a lot stronger than usual.
That is where the heavy breathing comes in. In Low power, I was working as hard as I normally would, or nearly as hard, just going faster. It isn’t at all like the full powered bikes I have giggled my way around the trails on. If you don’t punch the power up you still have to earn your turns.
Mid power offers more of a surge at the pedals, but is still fairly muted and gentle. Full gas is definitely a big boost, but nowhere near the rowdiness of the Rails or Levos I have ridden.
And going hard on the power will rinse the battery fairly quickly.
I started a lot of my rides with a 150m, one and a half kilometre, singletrack climb. Low power would see me use seven or eight percent of the battery charge, high power double that.
By riding nearly everywhere in Low power, I squeezed 49 kilometres and 1350m of ascent out of a charge.
On another day, using a bit more throttle here and there, I got 40ks and a little over 1000m vertical.
But for this bike and me, the sweet spot was about 35 kilometres of trail and around 800 up. At that distance and elevation gain, I could ride the entire distance on Mid power or Full power, which is at least 37% more fun, and get a really good workout at the same time.
On the example I had, with its 150mm RockShox Lyric fork and RockShox Super Deluxe Ultimate (seriously, that is what it is called) shock working at their best, it was a real pleasure on the trails. Going downhill the bike was quiet and predictable. And quiet - it will be interesting to get astride one that doesn’t share the ASX shifter and seat dropper of the review sled. I wonder if having two less cables makes the bike less clattery, but honestly the only bike I have been on that made less noise was a single speed.
One of the interesting aspects of the motor is the lack of drag. On some other e-bikes, once you hit the built-in speed limit, you go from having considerable assist to having the drag of turning the motor over. This one completely disengages, so you dont feel like you are fighting anything.
Another aspect of the lower power of this bike compared to the full-on versions, is that the rider is rewarded for maintaining a good cadence. For me, a pretty fast spin seemed to be the way to get the best out of the motor, I found myself changing gear maybe more often than usual to keep the revs up especially on flat or climbing trails.
And that right there is the real beauty of e-bikes in general, for me anyway. Trails that are a bit of a chore become a lot of fun. There is a favourite of mine in our local patch called Old Chevy. It is three kilometres of tight singletrack, with 49 metres of ascent and 78 metres of descent. It is full of short pinch climbs, and fun but very quick downhills, connected by contorted trail. Like I said, it is one of my favourites, but it always hurts. I am sure it is fun for the very fit, but now I KNOW it is fun for the electrically assisted. And on the EX e, it is fabulous. Coupled with enough torque to make the climbs fun to attack, the light and natural feeling of the bike means the downhill and traverse sections just feel like you are having the best day on a bike, ever, fitness wise. Every time.
And that brings me to the effect having this bike for a month has had on me.
As my specialist predicted, access to an e-bike has been a big help. I can go out on consecutive days, and give it what feels like a decent serve. I have ridden the bike much more than I was riding my bike before, and while the assist obviously makes that easier, the extra riding is putting kilometres in the bank and the benefits that brings.
I have done a couple of rides on my other bikes during the month of the EX e, and they have been the longest and hardest since I got going again. A big ride on the roadie, in the wind and rain, which incorporated a decent chunk of forest gravel, and a week later a long mountain bike ride all over the forest - neither one made feel anything other than satisfied. I could ride again the day after both outings, and did!
So not only did riding the EX e get me out more often, it added to my ability to get out more often.
That is a big deal from my perspective. I feel like I am more or less back, if not to normal (what exactly does that look like?), at least to a stage where I am up for whatever kind of bike ride presents itself. Like I was before I got hammered.
I have figured out what it’s good for. And who it’s good for.
It isn’t the guy who overtook me the last time I took the regular bike out. He came past me on a big climb, seat about ten centimetres too low, gear about four sprockets too high, shorts maybe a size and half too small. On a big e-bike, motor hauling him skyward while he pedalled with feet akimbo, heels on the pedals. He would not like the EX e, he would feel short-changed by its comparatively low power package.
But a mountain biker, looking for a way to cram more riding into a busy schedule, or get a decent ride in when not at peak fitness, or maybe a person on the rebuild trail, I can’t recommend the bike enough.
Trek sells a range extender, which sits in the bottle cage and provides an extra 40% of range. Well, “up to 44%”, according to Trek. I will get one, when I get my own Fuel EX e.
There, I said it. When I get my own Fuel EX e. It’s that good.
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Around here the time has come for stepping directly out of the office footwear and into the bike shoes and hitting the trails without changing anything else about the outfit. Well, that is if your office outfit is Dobies and a T shirt.
This week one of those quick after-work spins in the woods was interrupted by a strange sight.
I took a shortcut along the side of a crystal-clear stream and squatting there in the water was our favourite photographer. I have written about him before, and I have even seen him in this very stream quite a few years ago, trying for an image he has in his mind.
He was on his own, testing his faith in the waterproof housing wrapped around his very valuable camera, experimenting with that same sought-after image.
I happened along, and was immediately involved in the project.
Stand there, ride along here, repeat please, etc, for the next very enjoyable half an hour.
Later in the evening I received a bunch of images, my pick was the one at the top of this newsletter: even with me as the model I think you will agree it is a great shot.
What I really like about it is the spangle of out focus highlights in the foreground - I love those things when they turn up in the background of night shots of cityscapes.
Whether or not this is the look G has had in his head these last several years is not yet known - we haven’t caught up about it yet - but I reckon it is a banger.
Andy Warhol reckoned a good photo is in focus and has somebody famous in it.
I reckon a good photo is partially out of focus and has an Nzo product in it.
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The history of New Zealand mountain biking could arguably start sometime pre-WW2, when races like Round the Gorges were almost completely ridden on gravel. Mountain biking as we know it today got started in the 80s. When Nzo opened in 1998, it was already a popular sport among a small number of early adopters, and some exceptionally talented people were figuring out what was possible. One such gang was Geoff Cox and a loose team of riders he called the Free Flight Mission Crew.
Coxy would gather a few of his crew, go out to an event, or create one himself. The happenings were recorded as well as could be with the technology of the day, and he would then whittle the footage down into a tight little package with some graphics and music, and pass the resulting clips on to a contact at Sky TV. The FreeFlight clips became popular fillers between segments of sports broadcasts.
Geoff recently uploaded a selection of clips from the late 90s to a YouTube channel called MTB NZ Archive. As a snapshot of the literally bleeding edge of mountain biking at the time, these clips are absolute gold.
Check out the Mount Downhill, an event that defined New Zealand downhill racing at the time. Have a look at what the riders are wearing, to give yourself some idea why we started Nzo in the first place. See the carnage at water tank corner, and be glad you were not one of the spectators that got taken out by an errant biker.
Have a look at Nathans Queenstown: our son moved to Queenstown at the same time as we moved to Rotorua to start the Nzo project. He embarked on his own project, in some vacant land over his back fence at his first QT rental. Since then he has shaped a lot of the trails down that way, and his piece de resistance, Gorge Road Jump Park got it's DNA from that start in the backyard patch.
Dig in, have a look. These things are a time capsule of a time in New Zealand mountain biking that we won't get to have again.
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I posted a photo on the Nzo Facebook page the other day which has received more than the usual amount of attention.
I wouldn’t call it viral, especially after contracting COVID a few weeks back. That is viral. But it does show an admirable level of interest in the grass-roots side of mountain biking from the people on our circle, or whatever you call anybody likely to see an Nzo post.
The image shows young James, stoked on life after climbing a long singletrack called Apumoana. This thing gains 204m in two and half kilometres, and starts in a spot that requires a bit of effort to get to. The reason he was so keen to ride up Apumoana was the trail he wanted to ride when he got to the top: Te Poaka, which means The Pig.
He had seen the videos, now he wanted to test his new (second-hand) bike on it.
That is the connection I want to note: he had seen the videos. Being able to dial up just about any trail in the known universe for your research or entertainment is easy in these post dial-up days.
But back when the internet was mainly an idea looking for a broadband to express itself on, and Nzo was a fairly new shop in Rotorua, simple point-of-view cameras were not yet available and there was no practical way to share videos if you could create them. Which most people couldn’t.
But one of our early supporters in the Nzo project found ways to create short films and distribute them far and wide…
Our customer-turned-friend Geoff mounted a handicam (a small video camera, state of the art at the time) in a Pelican case (water and crash proof housing) strapped around his waist, connected to a pencil cam (small and simple camera) and collected footage featuring a group of early free riders figuring out how far they could push their luck.
The raw material would be edited on a primitive computer that could barely cope with the task, to create short and compelling movies that he would give to a contact at SkyTV. Amazingly, they were used as filler between segments of sports shows, and were seen by squllions, even as far afield as the UK.
He did all this around a heavy work schedule, a feat we still consider amazing.
Geoff is now a successful videographer, mercifully freed by the march of technology to do his work much more efficiently than he could back in the day.
He is the father of young James, who researched his upcoming ride online.
We rode up to Te Poaka because we are old-school, and downhills are always better when getting to them is hard.
James reckoned the effort was totally worthwhile.
The picture above shows father and son in celebratory stance, with the jawbone of the pig that gave Te Poaka its name hanging in the tree above them.
]]>The morning schedule looks something like this: Stagger around in search of coffee. Having secured some, retire to window seat to check morning’s latest happenings. Quickly become too depressed to continue looking at news, read something bike-related.
This morning I found an article on bikepacking.com about a trip across one the most remote stretches available in a mostly english-speaking country: the 1300 kilometre Anne Beadell highway from Laverton in Western Australia to Coober Pedy in SA.
Highway doesn’t really describe the road Dylan Kentch took, and that he made 90 to 100 kilometres a day on the sandy and corrugated track is pretty impressive. Of course, if he didn’t make that distance he would have run out of everything, because there is not much out there besides sand and corrugations.
I really enjoyed reading Dylan’s story, and a couple of lines caught my eye.
One was a casual aside he made while discussing minor technical difficulties he had with his gear shifting. His comment was that he never uses the lowest gear on any bike. I can think of worse rules to live by.
The other sentence that got my attention was the one where he says that he purposely didn’t bring three items into the Outback for a two-week trip: a stove, a raincoat, and a chamois.
Wondering what his get-up would look like, I was stoked to find a photo further down the story showing his shorts of choice: Dobies! There is no further information in the article about hygiene, cooking, or saddle amenities, so I can’t tell whether that was a good idea or not.
But fossicking through the orders on the Nzo website I found Dylan’s in March 2021, so he had plenty of time to decide whether the Dobies would be the thing for the job.
We get requests for sponsorship from people planning a return trip to the local shops. So finding a story about an expedition like this with one of our products in it because its owner selected it, bought it, and caned it for a year or so before using it on his voyage makes us very happy.
The last thing I do each October morning before wandering into the office is my personal bit of daily art in honour of Inktober. This morning’s piece is based on two images from Dylan’s story. Thanks for the inspiration, Dylan, looking forward to the next instalment.
Following on from our last post about how lucky kids in our hometown get to roam around the forest on their bikes as if they own the joint, here comes another example of a bicycle-based subculture liberating youngsters from their day-to-day lives. We found an excellent report from Soweto, South Africa this morning while we imbibed our morning joe.
Spinners, and their associated stylemeisters in the Stance camp, are a new group rapidly making themselves up as they go along.
By retrieving a couple or three bikes from the dump, tearing them down, welding them back together and cobbling together elongated drivetrains, customisers create bikes with outrageously long rear ends that enable them to drift. With the rider furiously (or casually) pedalling while leaning over the front end, the unweighted rear wheel can spin and be coaxed into sliding sideways. With the addition of chopped up PET bottles or chains to the rear tyre, they spin and slide even better.
Already spreading to India, this DIY bike boom is going to annoy people with nothing better to be grumpy about on a global basis, soon.
]]>When we were kids in Auckland, we got the keys to the city on the day we got bikes.
Our home range of a couple of blocks became anywhere we could reasonably get back from by dark. The entire city and beyond became fair game, and some of our all-day expeditions took us to places far away from our neighbourhoods and into all sorts of adventures.
I mused on that when I popped out of a trail a few weeks ago and met up with a small band of youngsters on their mountain bikes.
They were very interested in the bike I was on, so we had a quick discussion about that and I got a chance to take in some details. There were four of them, all on basic but well set-up little mountain bikes. My guess would put them at about eleven or twelve years old, about the same age as we were when we were out exploring Auckland.
They were excitable, and obviously very happy to be out in the woods on a spring evening, with a good half hour of light in front of them and a selection of trails they could drop to get home by dinner.
I wonder if they realise how incredibly lucky they are to be in that situation.
They are fortunate to be in a household that can offer them a bit of gear to use, and that their carers have faith that besides the obvious risks to life and limb the forest is a safe place to go and play.
Like pretty much anywhere, our little town definitely has its challenges. But for a posse of kids to be able to go off the leash into hundreds of kilometres of trails, unsupervised, must be one of its shining glories.
And I am proud to admit that this freedom to go and play in the trees doesn’t get old when the rider does.
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