One of Australia's toughest cross-country adventures attracts cyclists from around the country and overseas, but less than half reach the end. But Ollie Klein has crossed the finish line three times.

The Hunt 1000 is a self-supported, 1,000-kilometre cycling adventure from Canberra to Melbourne which takes riders one to two weeks to complete, and is considered one of Australia’s toughest and longest bikepacking events.

What the dickens !

Now i want to have a go !

  • tauEnglish
    3·
    5 days ago

    It does sound like it could be fun. I do prefer my bikes to have motors though - I took the mountain bike out the other day and a comparatively very small ~9km climb up a bit over 800m elevation to my destination peak had me severely disliking whoever decided to put a locked gate across a perfectly good fire trail. At least the way back was more fun, downhill almost the whole way made for a much more reasonable pace. I think it’d definitely take me more than a week to cover 1000km relying on pedals only…

    • Hanrahan@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      had me severely disliking whoever decided to put a locked gate across a perfectly good fire trail.

      I feel your pain :)

      I dislike exploring fire roads on my MTB. I have been thinking of getting a Stark Varg EX

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c34vyuCp8A0

      and explore the endless fire roads near me. Find ones i can ride on my MTB for loops etc

      I ride lots of them on my e-MTB but long slogs with road closed signs aren’t as much fun even on a ped-elec.

      • tauEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        The Starks do look nice - it’s good to see more ADR compliant bikes come out. I’ve actually been tossing around the idea of getting a Surron Ultra Bee for a while as I think it’d be good for single track and more technical fire trails (light weight and reasonable power/range, though would ultimately want a 21/18" wheel setup instead of 19/19"). Range is something that would have to be planned around for fire trail exploration (definitely still more limiting than petrol bikes) but for single track within an area the Ultra Bee would work well for me (I take my bike back and forth in the van already, and generally clock up <50km).

        The more powerful e-MTBs seem a good idea for exploring behind gates, I do keep a bit of an eye out for these on the secondhand market as if I found a cheap good one I’d consider it. It’d have to have both decent power and range though as 250w doesn’t really do that much going up steep hills and I wouldn’t want to be pedalling the added weight back without charge for the motor.