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Pirongia Mtb – Waikato
Pirongia MTB (formerly the Waipa Mountain Bike Club) continues to develop awesome tracks on Mt Pirongia, southwest of Hamilton. Ranging from grade 2 to 5, in summer they attract hundreds of riders a week.
Recently Les da Pres (Les McKenzie) got in touch with a February storm damage report - rainfall at the Pirongia MTB Park and surrounding environs reached 300-400 mm in some places. The storm destroyed some of the access roads - taking away culverts, bridges and two powered wheelbarrows. Les asked very nicely if Ground Effect could help Pirongia MTB to reinstate their e-barrow fleet - the Slush Fund sent $2000 their way. They also lost one of two bike trailers - a local business that is going to sort that out for them.
Pirongia is a perfect maunga for building tracks, being an old volcano covered in mostly native bush, which makes for a great riding environment. However it does have one downside, rich and thick volcanic soils that don’t drain well turning flat sections of track to mud in winter. To make the park a year-round riding destination, the club has taken to using e-barrows, funded by Ground Effect in 2019 and 2022, to get rock into the places it's needed. When that place is almost 1km into a grade 4 track you either want to be built like Arnie Schwarzenegger, or have a bit of modern technology on your side.
The new e-barrow will speed up Pirongia MTB's trail recovery plans hugely - as treasurer Adam Hittmann points out "trail maintenance keeps on giving".
Adrian from the club summarised the roll out of the first barrow in 2019 for us:
"On first use the e-barrow showed how useful it's going to be. A bunch of Waipa Mountain Bike Club’s keenest track builders headed into the bush to build a bridge over a creek on a new track under development. Now normally, the thought of lugging eight 20kg bags of rapidset concrete half a km into the bush on a wheelbarrow is enough to make even the keenest track builder cringe. But now, with our new Ground Effect-sponsored electric wheelbarrow it was faster and easier, meaning all the energy can be put into making great tracks. With that task out of the way, we’re already eyeing up other drainage trouble-spots where it will be useful in carting material in – it's sure to get plenty of use."
In 2015 the Slush Fund also subsidised the purchase of new trail signs.
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