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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.
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 for the past couple of years been using an e-barrow, funded by Ground Effect in 2019, 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.
As good as it was the single e-barrow struggled to get enough rock to the right places, and like an e-biker, got a bit sick of waiting for it's unpowered mates to keep up. Recently Adrian the Treasurer asked very nicely if we could help Pirongia Mtb add to their e-barrow fleet - the Slush Fund sent $2000 their way.
Now with two new e-barrows Pirongia can keep working to make sure the trails are sweet riding, no matter what the weather’s doing.
Follow Pirongia Mtb on Facebook, that’s where the action is.
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.