When Mellegers bought Crank’n Cycles over a decade ago, there were a few people in town who would ride out in the forest, mostly on fire roads, and informal singletrack scratched in by a few committed trail fairies.
Collie adventure trails: Arklow and Wellington National Park But, times are changing, and a large portion of the WA’s coal-fired infrastructure is on track to be phased out in the next decade in favour of renewable energy sources.Īnnear tells Flow the state government had set aside money to help Collie transition away from coal, and the town received a 10-million dollar grant to put in trails for bikers and hikers. Locals call Collie the ‘lakes district’ because old mines fill up and turn into electric blue and green bodies of water.Ĭollie is located in the heart of Western Australia’s coalfields, so it should not be a surprise the town’s foundations are built around mining and power generation. They would swap to their race wheels (when they got here), race at the Velodrome, get drunk as a skunk after, wake up in the morning, put their training wheels back on and ride back to Perth,” says Erik Mellegers, owner of the Crank’n Cycles bike shop, and a Collie MTB Club Committee Member. “There are so many stories of guys from Perth who would jump on their bikes and ride the 200km on rough, crappy roads to Collie. It’s also the starting spot for the famed Collie to Donnybrook Cycle Classic, which first ran in 1925, and is home to one of Western Australia’s oldest velodromes. We’d bet you’re going to be seeing a lot of photos of these corners in Wellington National Park.īack in its heyday, Collie had four or five frame builders living in town. It’s not just what you get on the surface there is a fair bit underneath.”įor a rural town about two hours south of Perth, the history of Collie has quite a few more chain links than you might expect. He gets a big smile on his face and says, ‘I’ve got one just like that, but I’ve got different wheels.’ He started telling me the best way to get out of town and things to look out for, and he wanted to have a yarn about where I was headed,” laughs Annear. “I’m thinking to myself, here we go, he’s going to give me a hard time about being on the road or something. As I’m coming out of the shop, he says to me, ‘is that your bike?'” Annear says.
My bike was all packed up and leaning against the wall, and this guy pulled up - flano shirt, trucker cap, bogan mullet hair-do, big beard. “I was just about to leave town, and I stopped at the bakery to get something to eat.