Kaiteriteri Mountain Bike Park Newsletter June 2025
The Newsletter of the Kaiteriteri Mountain Bike Park June 2025
Beech to Beach
Founded in 2007 the Kaiteriteri Mountain Bike Park (KMBP) now has over 40 trails with over 70km of riding and walking spread across 170 hectares of bushland. Overlooking the beautiful Kaiteriteri beach KMBP aims to provide a range of riding experiences, with an emphasis on family friendly riding, while improving the biodiversity of the park. Go to bikekaiteriteri.co.nz
Winter riding. Squeezing a quick ride in after work with the bike lights ready for when the sun goes down. Cool calm evenings. Beautiful light. Flowing tracks or gnarly descents.
To keep this gem of ours fully operational we depend heavily on volunteers. The help that we need is varied and sporadic or regular. Track work occurs most Sundays over winter. Racing events when they occur require all hands-on deck! The conservation work being done in the park involves 2 weekly trap checking or pine tree control whenever you have the time.
If you use the park or just want to be involved, give us a call or send an email to bike@krr.co.nz.
Michael Brewer, Editor
The KMBP Committee … One at a time!
Greg Southcombe – Chairman of the Mountain Bike Committee. Greg moved to this area three years ago and quickly became involved with the mountain bike park. He enjoys cruising the tracks in the park and has also become involved in the trapping and pine tree control programmes. Away from the park he works in the digital marketing world. He’s also not bad at taking selfies! He made the mistake of becoming an enthusiastic, energetic and helpful committee member resulting in him being elected Chairman when the post became available last year.
Trail Gossip
Taniwha Handlebar is being given a tidy up hopefully to make it appeal more to the less confident intermediate riders.
The lower Velocity revamp has started helped by an amazing effort over 3 days put in by students from the NMIT ranger’s course with help and guidance given by committee members.
Jaws has almost finished having its remake. Sam Knowles has been smoothing and revamping it so get in there and enjoy it before the winter rain starts undoing some of his great work.
Huff and Revelation are soon to have a tidy up to get rid of some rough patches.
Upper Velocity is going to have major reshaping and rerouting work started on it probably in August. This is going to be a big job taking several months so bear with us as the track will remain closed through out.
Sponsors’ Corner
Gary Donaldson is a keen rider of the park who is part owner of Donaldson Civil. He is a man who knows about diggers (among other things!) and his firm has a long history of giving their time and equipment free of cost to the park to help build tracks.
He has recently offered to generously give his own time and a digger to tidy up huff and revelation tracks. We are always on the lookout for new sponsors so give us a call if interested or hit reply to this email.
Conservation News
A grant of almost $15000 has been recently received from the Air New Zealand Every Corner Project. This is an exciting and somewhat humbling achievement as there were over 640 applications from around the country for around 100 grants. We feel it recognises the excellent conservation work we are doing and the commitment we have made to taking it further. A great thanks to all the volunteers that have helped us achieve this. The funding is to go towards replacing ageing traps and the purchase of more automatic traps to further target rats, mustelids and opossums.
Thanks to the Whenua Iti Outdoors students who spent a wet morning with Greg Southcombe and Ross Maley helping to get rid of unwanted wattle trees and pines around the skills area.
Pine tree control is ongoing with the focus now on the Corkscrew area. Over the last 3 1/2 years over 32000 pines have been killed. A Youtube video made by our local filmmaker Richard Sidey is available here detailing the amazing exploits of the hardworking team behind this achievement.
A new trapline has been put in on lower Badjelly as this is where Tomtits/Miromiro have been sighted. Since the initial sighting there have been several additional sightings on Piki ke te ra climbing trail and on lower Velocity. A South Island Robin/toutouwai has also been seen. These sightings are exciting as they may indicate that our predator control efforts are allowing these birds to return to the park.
Trapping over the last 3 months has removed 97 rats, 37 opossums, 11 mice and 2 stoats. A ferret has also been caught for the first time.
Seedling rescue has been happening from the sides of tracks which seem to encourage Rimu, Kahikatea and Tōtara seedlings to sprout presumably due to the extra light and loosened soil. Some are just dug up and translocated to a nearby safe site while others are being nursed for a couple of years off site with a view towards replanting. 50 Rimu seedlings were recently found.