Twenty-eight pubs in one street.

There is a story you could tell about Hill End, and the story is mostly about numbers. Twenty-eight pubs in eighteen-seventy-something. Eight thousand people on the goldfields at the peak. Holtermann’s nugget, two hundred and eighty-six kilograms of quartz and reef-gold pulled out of the hill — still the largest single specimen of reef gold ever found anywhere in the world. The story is true. It is also not why I went.

I went because I wanted to camp on the Bridle Track and pan the Turon. The track follows the river through the gold country between Bathurst and Hill End — a cliff-edge dirt road that has slipped into the river more than once and probably will again. It is not a road for hurry. It is a road for paying attention.

There is a kind of place that asks you to ride at the pace of the road itself. The Bridle Track is one.

Out of Sydney through Lithgow, fuel at Bathurst, then the slow turn north onto the Bridle Track. Hunter sat into the road early — the suspension, which is plush for a standard bike but soft for a loaded one, settled on the gravel and stayed settled. I rode the first hour standing on the pegs because that was the assignment I had given myself, and because standing keeps you honest about what the front wheel is doing.

▍ Wide · the Bridle Track camp at golden hour — purple tent, green tarp, Hunter beside

The track runs the river for most of its length. Drop the speed, hold the line, let the corners come at the pace of the corners.

I made camp in the late afternoon. The Turon at this point of the year is shallow and clear, the riverbed mostly cobble, the banks mostly tussock. There is a specific quiet that arrives at a river camp once you stop moving — not silent, but the kind of quiet that is full of one thing repeating, and the brain settles against it the way a stone settles against the bottom of a current.

I got the fire on the second strike of the ferro rod, which is the small competence that feels much larger when you’re alone. I cooked something simple, drank tea from the cast-iron pan, and sat. The bike clicked and ticked as it cooled. The river did its one thing repeating.

▍ Hunter's headlight close, the purple tent in soft focus behind

The headlight catches the trees on the way up. The book I was reading stayed in the dry bag.

Pleasure is the thing that asks you for more of itself. The other thing — the quieter one — does not ask anything.

Hill End now is a small town that admits to its own past with a slightly tired honesty. The buildings that survived survived because the people who lived in them never quite gave up; the buildings that didn’t survive are visible in their absence — paddocks where streets used to be, a kerbstone that runs out to nothing, the long rectangular hollow of a dam that was a hotel forecourt before the hotel fell down.

I rode the loops, parked outside the museum that was once the post office, and ate a pie from a place that opens at irregular hours and closes when it feels like it. The pie was good. I sat on the curb with the helmet beside me and thought about how many people had stood at this corner over a century and a half and decided to stay another day. Most of them eventually didn’t. The town is what they left.

Then I rode back down the Bridle Track in the slanting light of late afternoon, took the long way home through Sofala because the Sofala road is one of the great motorcycle roads of the country, and got back to the parking garage at nine with a bash plate full of fresh dirt and a slightly different head than the one I had left with.

A written companion to Episode 2 — Hill End Moto Camping on the Motorcycle Seat Wisdom YouTube channel.