Ride the rough: Tasmania's gravel biking boom
With its endless network of dirt roads and rugged tracks, Tasmania is a gravel biker’s paradise. Andrew Bain has all the insider tips on this must-try adventure.
On a dirt road outside of Bothwell, I’m descending towards the River Clyde on a bike. The slow climb from Ouse is behind me and I’m hunched over the handlebars, skirting corrugations and crunching over gravel. From afar, it looks somehow wrong, appearing every bit like a road bike astray on gravel, but it feels very right, for this is a gravel bike, and this is gravel riding.
Occupying a space between road cycling and mountain biking, gravel riding is the new black in cycling, taking riders away from trafficked roads and onto unsealed back roads and forestry tracks. With this surge in interest has come a parallel boom in sales of purpose-designed gravel bikes. Though they resemble road bikes with their drop handlebars and comparable geometry, gravel bikes have wider tyres with more aggressive tread, gearing that’s closer to a mountain bike, and often a more relaxed riding position.
“We saw the writing on the wall early, so we invested pretty heavily in gravel bikes,” says Nick Driessen of Hobart and Launceston bike store Roll Cycles. “I think Australia is quite late to the gravel party – it’s really big in places like America – but gravel bikes are now the biggest part of our roadbike sales, if you group them together. Gravel/adventure makes up probably 60% of our sales, whereas the last 40% is traditional road bikes.”
While the rise of gravel biking has been global, it’s places with extensive networks of unsealed secondary roads and tracks that have become gravel darlings. Tasmania is one of them.
“Tassie internationally is known as one of the best places to ride gravel,” says Sofia Tsamassiros, owner of Eudaimonia Tasmanian Cycling Tours. “I think gravel riding in Tasmania is super-cool because you can go anywhere from champagne gravel country roads to deep into forestry tracks.”
Sofia founded Eudaimonia in 2019, always with one eye towards gravel, which she’d fallen in love with early in her discovery of cycling. This year, the company ran its first dedicated gravel tour, leading a group of riders around the dirt roads and tracks of Ben Lomond, Derby and Tasmania’s north-east. Sofia imagines more gravel tours to come, to many different locations.
Credit: Josh Firth
Credit: Josh Firth
“I was quite notoriously known for taking people on gravel on road bikes anyway,” she says.
“I think it’s really cool to see that people are more interested in being off the beaten track and drawn a bit more to the experience of a gravel tour. Tassie has endless possibilities for what it could offer.”
A devout following
As gravel biking’s popularity grows, so too does Tasmania’s community of gravel bikers. The Gravel Grinders Tasmania Facebook group, a page for cyclists on the ‘long forgotten roads and gravel trails of Tasmania’ has around 1100 members, and looking around even the streets of Hobart and Launceston, the tyres on the bikes are getting wider, with gravel bikes sometimes even replacing road bikes as the city steeds of choice.
Nick is one cyclist who has discarded his road bike since discovering gravel biking. Louis Stevens is another. The Beauty Point cyclist was first a road biker, until being well and truly bitten by the gravel bug. He’s since cycled in the Tassie Gift (a gruelling annual 1800km off-road cycling event around Tasmania), steered a group of friends through a week-long gravel tour of Tassie’s West Coast and, the day after we spoke, was setting off on an 11-day gravel loop through Central Australia.
“I started out as a roadie, and then I was thinking, ‘there’s all these glorious gravel roads that I don’t go up because I’m on a road bike’,” he says. “So I bought a gravel bike and loved it. Then I bought a second bike and I loved that so much that I sold my roadie. I’d have to say without a doubt that I’m happiest when I’m on my gravel bike.”
Riders are drawn to gravel biking for myriad reasons, but talk to converts and two motivations resound: beauty and safety. By nature, gravel biking is about nature, taking riders deep into forests and remote valleys or onto mountain slopes typically avoided by more single-minded major roads. It’s here that one of gravel biking’s greatest rewards – a sense of exploration – is most keenly felt.
Credit: Scott Mattern
“Often the riding might be a bit harder – it’s a lot hillier and the road might be rougher – but you also get that deeper sense of adventure,” Sofia says. “When gravel riding, you’re not typically following the normal path of where all the tourists are going. Your end destination might be the same, but the path to get there is so different and so unique. I think that’s really, really special.”
The only thing often missing in the view on a gravel ride is traffic. Eschewing highways and often only taking to bitumen to connect with unsealed roads, gravel biking’s terrain is naturally far from that of most vehicles. It’s that disconnect – so readily found in Tasmania – that adds a layer of safety to gravel biking, quarantining riders from traffic but without many of the inherent risks of mountain biking.
“It’s all about destination for me, and then being away from traffic and the hustle and bustle,” Nick says. “It’s getting more dangerous to ride on the roads, so if you can go out and hit the back country where there’s a lot less traffic, it’s fantastic.
“You don’t have to travel too far to find some gravel in Tasmania. You could be riding up Ben Lomond for example, all on gravel road and just a 40-minute drive out of Launceston. Or you could be on back roads down in the Huon Valley.
“There’s some really good gravel here, and there’s so much natural beauty that’s not hard to find.”
Gravel Gems
“I really love the north-east corner for gravel riding. I like Mt Barrow. I love climbing and I love the change of nature as you get higher in elevation. You go from open farmland up into the trees, then above the trees into a rocky, alpine-esque landscape.” – Sofia Tsamassiros
“I like riding out the back of Judbury. I park the car somewhere in Judbury and go for a ride out the back through Lonnavale. It’s really quiet and you’ve got mixed terrain – a mixture of hills and flat riding.” – Nick Driessen
“Across the top of Narawntapu National Park, from Holwell to York Town or Bakers Beach is brilliant. You go right along the ridge, and there’s a fire tower up there with spectacular views. From Beaconsfield or Beauty Point, it’s about a 50km loop.” – Louis Stevens