Gentle Annie Taihape-Napier - anyone done it lately?

[mazz1972]

Has anyone been over the Gentle Annie lately? Doing it in the weekend and just wondering what condition it's in, if anyone knows?

Cheers

[Rosie]

Clint640 and I did it on Boxing day.
It's in reasonable nick. The Taihape side looked like it had been graded recently.

[yungatart]

Haven't been up there recently but there is still some 35 k of gravel in the middle.
Sometimes the gravel is pushed to the sides and the road is hardpacked but corrugated to buggery. Othertimes the gravel has just been replaced and it is rather soft (unless you hit it of course, when it amazingly becomes hard!)

[jrandom]

OK, that's creepy. I was just thinking about posting a thread asking the same question...

[Coldrider]

Not sure whether they're logging at the mo, but be careful of cagers that think they can handle the gravel.

[NZsarge]

Yod did it 10 or 11 days ago, PM him.

[Forest]

I did it last year. Great ride - except when I dropped the rental bike in a gravel hairpin

[mazz1972]

Thanks for your replies peoples. We did it on Sunday from Taihape side.

First 40 kms were fantastic! Lovely windy roads, bit of road works unfortunately but not much.

Then we hit pissy drizzle, you know the stuff that wont bead up and run off your visor, so you can't see, and you end up having to go slower and your visor fogs up so you can see even less so you go even slower, and much of the time we were riding in cloud. This continued the whole way to Hastings but at least visibility was better when we got off the gravel and could speed up. The gravel was not bad at all, except for the lack of vision making it a bit hard to judge where the gravel was loose and what was hard packed.

Despite the weather it was way easier than we thought it would be.....not steep like we were expecting. Just a shame we didn't see any of the views!

Saw a green 08 KLR650 heading the other way, was it anyone from here?