It's hard here. We have bushland all around the city and the greens make such a fuss.
Those ebikes are good Flash. A friend runs a local ebike shop. They're heavy but you can get them tweaked so it overrides the limiter making it go faster. Ebikes are aren't cheap but they very practical if you want to cover distance, or lots of painful hills.
This is my current bike. The new bikes in last couple years come with internal cable routing which looks tidier, and adjustable seatposts standard which are almost a must these days. An adjustable seatpost purchased alone could be $200 -$300 but worth every cent.
For hardtails around $1000 I'd look at Giant and Specialised for bang for buck. If you're pretty tall I'd consider a 29". Standard now seems to be 27.5". For cross country racing 29" is common. 29" rolls over trail chatter and stuff more easily, not as twitchy. I like to get air and flick the thing around a bit and like tight twitchy stuff so 29" not my cup of tea but they are very practical for most trail.
My current ride:
Other brands (google them) include
YETI
PIVOT
SPEC
Norco Bicycles
Giant
CANYON
Norco
Trek
Intense
Santa Cruz
GT
SCOTT
Merida
KONA
CUBE
Marin
Ellsworth
Turner
BMC
FOCUS
IBIS
NS
Yt