00 on top of that. Kids aged 5–15 ride at half the adult Mountain Pass rate, and under-5s are free. Book uplift ahead in summer school holidays or you'll be pedalling.
The catch: the trails sit in working HVP pine plantation. A harvest scheduled for late 2025 would have closed around 11 km of the network, including the World Cup line, before it was postponed on 16 June 2026 and deferred to spring 2027 — so those trails should stay open right through the 2026/27 season. Check the operator's Mystic Bike Park updates before you count on a specific trail. Autumn is the pick of the seasons here — drier dirt, cooler air, fewer fire-danger closures. Our full Mystic Bike Park review goes deeper on the pass structure and which trails to prioritise on a first visit.
2. Omeo MTB Park
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Omeo is a town of about 400 people with 114 km of purpose-built singletrack on its doorstep. The full network opened on 5 December 2025, built by Common Ground Trails in partnership with Canadian trail builder Jordon Virgl, funded to
0 million by East Gippsland Shire and the state and federal governments. It is the biggest single build Victoria has seen.
Two trailheads, connected by shuttle. Livingstone Park sits at the bottom of Creek Street, a short walk from the pub, and has free showers, change rooms, a bike wash, an asphalt pump track, a gravel skills course and a swimming hole in the creek. The Sam Hill summit is where the gravity lives, with up to 590 m of shuttle-served vertical run by Blue Dirt MTB and Gravity Dirt Co. Bangarang is the double-black freeride line that finishes with a 40 ft (~12 m) road gap. Pendulum is 2.73 km of wide, Whistler-styled black jump trail. Flomeo gives you 5.5 km of blue jump-flow, and Krank Dog is the 9.68 km blue climb that winds back up to the Sam Hill summit if you'd rather earn a lap than shuttle it.
It's a long way out: about five hours from Melbourne, or a shorter run up the Great Alpine Road from Bairnsdale. Go for three days, not one. Details and current shuttle timetables are on Ride Omeo, and Omeo also features in our best new MTB parks of 2026 roundup.
3. Warburton Bike Park
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Stage 1A opened on 19 July 2025 with about 30 km of deliberately gentle trail, and plenty of riders wrote it off as a family park. That reading aged badly. The operator now lists over 80 km open with up to 650 m of descent off Mt Tugwell, and uplift started running in April 2026 from Wesburn and Warburton up to the summit. The funded Southern Network build is planned at roughly 125 km, due for completion in 2027, with about 160 km the longer-term vision if later stages proceed.
World Trail cut the first 100 km using their blended-earth approach, so the surface holds together through Yarra Valley winters better than the region's older hand-cut trails. The difficulty spread on the trails we've mapped runs 12 green, 14 blue and 5 black, which makes this the most beginner-weighted big network in Victoria — a genuinely useful thing when you're riding with someone new and don't want to drive four hours. Wattsup is 2.8 km of blue that most first-timers here start on.
Wesburn Park is the main trailhead: free parking, toilets and showers, bike wash, tool stations, a World Trail pump track, picnic areas and a playground. It's 70 km east of Melbourne, about 90 minutes door to door, which puts a full day of riding inside a single Saturday. Current trail and shuttle status lives on the Warburton Bike Park site.
4. Mt Buller
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Buller is the alpine one. The village sits at 1,600 m under a 1,805 m summit, the air is thin enough to notice on the first climb, and there are 120+ km of cross-country singletrack spread down the mountain. The headline ride is the Australian Alpine Epic, 46 km of IMBA-designated trail that runs out across the Mt Stirling backcountry before finishing along the Delatite River, and it deserves the reputation — the resort budgets 6–8 hours and about 1,000 m of climbing for it, so it is a full day rather than a morning. The Klingsporn Bridle Track is often mentioned in the same breath, but it is a 6.7 km walking trail dropping to Mirimbah, not part of the bike network — leave it to the hikers.
The Northside Express chairlift returned to mountain bike service for the 2025/26 season after a multi-year break, with about 10 km of new trail added alongside it. That changes the maths for gravity riders who'd previously written Buller off as a pedalling mountain. The village has bike hire, a pump track, skills park, bike wash and on-mountain first aid, plus enough hospitality that a rest day isn't a wasted one. Season runs roughly November to April; check Mt Buller for lift dates. If you're deciding between the two big alpine resorts, we've broken it down in Mt Buller vs Falls Creek.
5. Falls Creek Mountain Bike Park
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Falls Creek is the quieter alpine option, and quieter is the point. Over 50 km of purpose-built singletrack radiates from a ride-in, ride-out village on the Bogong High Plains, with a 535 m descent from the summit to the village and cross-country lines running out onto the plains via the Aqueduct and Packhorse trails. Blue Dirt runs the shuttles Thursday to Monday through summer.
The riding feels different to Buller. Where Buller is long descents off a steep-sided mountain, Falls Creek is more open — tussock, snow gums, big sky, and XC that keeps going as far as your legs will take it. The network keeps growing, with a UCI-standard downhill trail, the Ruined Castle trails and the Cloud 9 adaptive trail all added in recent build seasons. Summer is short at 1,600 m: December to March is the reliable window, and the village empties fast either side of it. Trail and shuttle updates are on the Falls Creek MTB site. Both alpine resorts also feature in our Australian alpine MTB guide.
6. Big Hill Mountain Bike Park, Mount Beauty
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Big Hill is where Australian mountain biking grew up. The network dates back to the sport's early days here, and more than 60 km of it was cut by hand by Team Mount Beauty volunteers rather than machines. That shows in the riding: narrow, natural, unpolished in the best way, with none of the sameness that a fully machine-built park can fall into.
The layout is a spaghetti bowl, and the only way to make sense of it is the colour-coded loop system — Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange and Red — which is signed well enough to follow without stopping every junction to check a phone. Rocky Valley Bikes in town does hire and servicing, and the trailhead has toilets, water, tools and a bike wash. Mount Beauty is 30 minutes from Bright, so most riders pair the two on the same trip. Take the club's Team Mount Beauty map before your first lap.
7. Forrest MTB Trails
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Forrest is the wet one, and it's the reason to keep riding through a Victorian winter. Two trailheads sit either side of a town of a few hundred people in the Otway Ranges. The original Yaugher side, north of town, is old-school hand-cut cross-country through dry eucalypt and grass-tree country on free-draining ridge soil — it takes rain far better than anything else within two hours of Geelong. The Yaugher Super Loop is 11.5 km and the longest trail in the network.
The southern trailhead on Rivendell Lane is the newer half: a
.32 million rebuild added 21 stacked-loop trails through fern gullies and wet eucalypt, plus a large asphalt pump track, a separate kids and adaptive pump track, three skills lines and two jump lines. That build made Forrest one of the country's better adaptive riding destinations. The Otway Odyssey has run since 2007, and has started and finished in Forrest since the course changed in 2012. Bike hire, shuttles and food are all in town, and the pub does a decent job of the rest. Trail conditions are posted on
Ride Forrest.
8. Creswick — Djuwang Baring
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Djuwang Baring means "long track" in Dja Dja Wurrung, and the name fits a 60 km network of roughly 70 trail segments across eight zones. Dirt Art designed it, it fully opened on 30 November 2024, and it was meant to host the cross-country mountain bike event at the 2026 Commonwealth Games before those were cancelled. The trails were built anyway, which is Victoria's gain.
About 30% of the network is adaptive-suitable, one of the highest proportions in the country. Hammon Park is the main trailhead and it's genuinely well appointed: bitumen pump track, skills area, learn-to-ride area, BBQ and shelters, accessible toilets with a Changing Place facility, e-bike chargers and a repair stand. Grades run from green loops through black gravity lines to the double-black Southern Pro Line. It's 20 minutes from Ballarat and 90 from Melbourne, which makes it the obvious western counterweight to Warburton. Trail status is on Djuwang Baring.
9. Mt Baw Baw Alpine Resort
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Melbourne's closest alpine resort is 120 km east — about 2.5 hours by road — and it rides nothing like the resorts further north. The village sits at 1,460 m under a 1,564 m summit, and the trails are natural in character: rock, off-camber roots and fall-line pitch rather than manicured berms. DH1 is the double-black centrepiece, 300 m of vertical that punishes lazy line choice. There's a large horror-themed singletrack network alongside it and beginner cross-country through snow gum woodland for the days you want less.
The resort tells riders to arrange their own shuttle if they want to lap DH1, so sort that before you drive up — pedalling it is a very different day out. Baw Baw is the cheapest alpine riding in the state and the least crowded, and those two facts are related. Current lift and shuttle dates are on the Mt Baw Baw site.
10. Haunted Hills Mountain Bike Park
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Old coal-mining country near Moe, turned into 15+ km of progressive machine-built singletrack that flows as well as anything in Gippsland. Haunted Hills is the designated hero track of the G7 — a network of seven central Gippsland bike parks — and the local mythology runs all through the build, from tombstone-shaped signage to a pump track laid out as a skull and crossbones.
There's an asphalt pump track, toilets, BBQs, shelters and a bike wash-down station. No commercial shuttle, but the climbs are short and the descents are the sort you want to do again immediately. It's about 90 minutes from Melbourne and pairs neatly with Maryvale Pines or Somewhere Good if you're making a Latrobe Valley weekend of it.
Where can you ride mountain bikes near Melbourne?
Melbourne has more riding inside an hour than most Australian capitals. Lysterfield MTB Park, 40 km south-east, has 24+ km of purpose-built singletrack and hosted the 2006 Commonwealth Games cross-country event; the volunteer Lysterfield District Trail Riders keep it in shape and run social, women's and junior rides.
Plenty Gorge covers 1,350 ha of bushland 20 km north of the CBD on Wurundjeri Country. The trails are mostly intermediate to advanced, hand-cut and grassroots in character, with many legacy lines working through formal sanctioning with Parks Victoria and the Plenty Gorge MTB Club. The You Yangs splits neatly in two: the Park Office and Kurrajong side is 20 km of flat, fast plantation singletrack that suits families, while the Drysdale Road and Stockyards entrance 5 km north holds the rock gardens and the downhill. Arthurs Seat adds 20+ km of steep, rocky riding on the Mornington Peninsula with shuttles and guided tours available.
For weekend range beyond the city limits, our MTB long-weekend getaways from Melbourne covers drive times, costs and where to stay.
Which Victorian MTB park is best for beginners?
Warburton, by a clear margin. Of the trails mapped there, 12 are green and 14 blue against just 5 black, the pump track at Wesburn Park gives kids somewhere to burn energy between laps, and the 90-minute drive from Melbourne means a bad-weather day costs you an afternoon rather than a weekend.
Creswick is the next pick, especially for adaptive riders and mixed-ability groups, thanks to that 30% adaptive-suitable network and the Changing Place facility at Hammon Park. The You Yangs' Kurrajong side works for a first ride on dirt without any real consequence. Mystic will happily take a beginner on the green flow lines, but the pass system means you're paying full freight to ride a small slice of the mountain.
When is the best time to ride MTB in Victoria?
- September to April — the alpine parks. Buller, Falls Creek, Baw Baw and Dinner Plain are snowbound in winter and lifts only run in summer.
- March to May — the best all-round window. Autumn dries the High Country dirt, drops the temperature and cuts fire-danger closures.
- June to August — head to Forrest's Yaugher side, the You Yangs, or the Goldfields around Bendigo and Castlemaine, all of which drain better than the Yarra Valley.
- Any Total Fire Ban day — assume plantation and state forest parks are shut. Mystic, Warburton and the Goldfields networks all close on declared days.
Honourable mentions
| Park |
Region |
Why go |
| Indigo Epic Trail |
High Country |
56 km blue all-mountain trail linking Beechworth and Yackandandah; ride 17 km, 39 km or the lot |
| Beechworth MTB Park |
High Country |
19+ km of granite riding across 15 routes, 2 km from town |
| La Larr Ba Gauwa |
Goldfields |
34 km on Mount Alexander granite at Harcourt, 130 km from Melbourne |
| Anglesea Bike Park |
Surf Coast |
Victoria's first pro-built 4X track, plus ~30 km of Eumeralla coastal heath riding |
| Dinner Plain |
Alpine |
Snow gum singletrack at 1,600 m with a village that stays quiet |
| Buxton MTB Park |
Central |
Signed intermediate loops 100 km from Melbourne, including the 13.3 km Acheron Ridge |
| Silvan |
Dandenongs |
Short, steep and loamy; the Melbourne gravity crowd's midweek habit |
FAQ
What is the best mountain bike park in Victoria?
Mystic Bike Park at Bright is the strongest all-round pick: 450 m of vertical, paid uplift most days of the week, and trails from a beginner pump track to World Cup downhill terrain, with a town at the bottom full of cafés, breweries and bike shops. If you want the biggest network instead, Omeo's 114 km is now the largest purpose-built system in the state.
Does Mt Buller have a chairlift for mountain bikes?
Yes. The Northside Express chairlift returned to mountain bike service for the 2025/26 summer season after a multi-year hiatus, and about 10 km of new trail was built alongside it. Lift operating dates vary by season and weather, so confirm on the Mt Buller site before booking accommodation around a gravity day.
Is Warburton Bike Park open?
Yes. Stage 1A opened on 19 July 2025 with roughly 30 km of trail, and the operator now lists over 80 km open with up to 650 m of descent off Mt Tugwell. A fee-based shuttle service has been running from Wesburn and Warburton to the summit since April 2026, seven days a week in school holidays and weekends otherwise. The funded Southern Network build is planned to reach about 125 km by 2027, with roughly 160 km the longer-term vision if later stages are approved.
Which Victorian MTB parks have shuttles or uplift?
Mystic, Omeo, Warburton, Mt Buller (chairlift), Falls Creek, Big Hill, Forrest, Creswick, Beechworth, Arthurs Seat, Indigo Epic and the Stockyards side of the You Yangs all have some form of uplift or shuttle. Frequency varies from daily in peak season at Mystic to weekends only off-peak at Warburton, and Mt Baw Baw asks riders to arrange their own — always check the operator before driving.
How far is Omeo from Melbourne?
About five hours by road, most commonly via the Princes Highway to Bairnsdale and then up the Great Alpine Road. It's the longest drive of any major Victorian MTB park, which is exactly why the 114 km network and 590 m of shuttle-served vertical are best treated as a three-day trip rather than a day out.
Plan your trip
Victoria's riding clusters into four natural trips. The High Country — Bright, Mount Beauty, Beechworth and the Indigo Epic — is the deepest week you can put together, with Buller and Falls Creek within reach for a lift day. East Gippsland is Omeo alone, and it's worth the drive. Melbourne's east now means Warburton first, with Lysterfield and the Dandenongs as after-work fillers. West of the city, Creswick and the You Yangs cover a weekend between them.
Use the Victoria map view to build a multi-park route, or browse every Victorian park for shuttle days, opening hours and current trail conditions. If you only have one weekend and no plan, drive to Bright.