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Thursday 21 May 2009

Whinlatter & Grizedale Forests

From Whinlatter & Grizedale Forests


Our substitute for Wild Boar 24. The weekend was spent in two forests, Saturday we rode Whinlatter and Sunday we chose Grizedale, although also known as Gizdale in some circles.
We eventually managed to get onto a campsite which would accept a group larger than two people, which proved hard work, but the Camping and Caravanning site near Staveley now comes highly recommended; facilities, pitches and even the pub on site all get top marks.

Whinlatter was a good hour drive from the campsite, but when we got there was well worthwhile. The Red Route is divided into two loops, North and South. WE ended up with a riding buddy, a local guy who knew which trails we should do first, so opted to do North then South. There were a few ‘offs’ during the day, but the final part of the North Loop has some pretty fast jumps that really can be taken at speed (once you’ve done it more than once). Forgetting the camera on the Saturday didn’t make me so happy with myself. The South loop was similar, also with a flowing finale, still with a lot of slate and rock so easy to make mistakes if wet. Luckily for Alisdair, the powder blue demo bike suited him and must have affected him too, bcse the next thing we knew he’d taken the bike back and bought a FSR XC. How’s that for impulse buying!

Grizedale Forest offered a slightly shorter route, but much less singletrack and the consensus was that we’d opted for the trail-days the right way round. There is quite a bit of fire road on the Grizedale North Face Trial. Which is all when and good at Drakes Corner for the rally in December, but a little more singletrack would be a positive change. We all enjoyed the ride through, Joff put his foot into a bog, up to his knee, so that has to be a funny moment! And some dithering old codger managed to stop still in front of us on the decking sections, not really wide enough to put your feet down, providing a slight panic moment. And Andrew not quite going round the burm would have been good to see. The downhill finish to the ride was good too, well apart from the two gates stuffed right in the middle of a fast flowing downwards section! The very final 10 seconds of the ride were met with a huge amount of rain, so getting into the car proved very wet. The Audi cleans up nicely, so it's all good.

Kirsty did well with her Scott bike, looked very much at ease with it all and pretty much did everything we did, not bad for her first red route trail sessions.

I have definitely managed to kill the first headset in the Stumpy. Riding the demo bike forks provided no change to the ‘clicking’ noise leaving pretty much the head set as the culprit. All changes arranged for my next trip to the service dept., so we’ll see how a new headset goes and my forks back in.

All in all, a fantastic weekend of riding and beers, plenty of rain and sunshine together (typical Lakes Weather) all went down well.

Photos (of the Sunday at least), can be found here. Video of some of the trails can be found here.

Sunday 10 May 2009

The Great Ayton Key Search

From Great Ayton & Guisborough May 09

So, we've all done it. We've all set off for a one way trip, leave a car at the end and we'll just drive back to pick it up from the start when we've finished. We've all been there and found some dork forgets the key to the car waiting at the finish. Yep, we all had to cycle back to the start of the very long hill on Saturday to get home. Cheers Matt!

Matt and Chibu were both in demo bike territory again, this time is was the Scott Genius and Spark, both very highly specced demo versions too (no wonder Matt wasn't concentrating on where his keys were!). I think that the Genuis (Matt) was better than the Trek Ex-8 by the way we were talking about it, however it was the carbon fibre version on test and way too much money. The Spark was also good (Chibu) and decisions about buying them now loom...

We started at the car-park for Captain Cook's Monument and, heading up towards Roseberry Topping, we peeled off into the woods (which many trees have been felled since I was there last). The roots and trails were really dry so it was easier to keep good speed through these sections and, a lot of fun. We managed to get to the top of the world, well, it felt like it at least, on the top of High Cliff (an craggy part of the hill which makes the tallest point). There were a lot of people out walking for the day we noticed, although my eyes were watering most of the time as we went whizzing past them, so I'm presuming they were walkers.

It was pretty windy most of the day and somehow George conjured up a route that had the wind at our back 90% of the day. We're still not quite sure how the luck of the Irish was working in his favour and how he managed this, particularly bcse we did a loop! Maybe it was bcse we were joined by older brother Richard, and the power two Irish have is so much greater...We'll never know :-)

Once again Trail Guru failed to work properly on the iPhone, having researched the Garmin Edge 705, this really does look like a better option for reliability on GPS coverage and record GPS tracks. The downside of this being the £240 that needs to be shelled out to pick one up. I'll keep checking eBay to see if there's one going second hand.

It was only after our downhill finale, which saw Matt horizontal and a bike pretty much doing the same (always worrying
when it's still owned by the bike shop) that we realized the our finale was to be followed by the real finale, the long uphill slog to the car which any of us had keys for. No injury to the demo bike, so that was good news and slightly scuffed elbows all part of the fun!

We picked up some good photos of the day, maybe a video too after some editing. Keep your eye on the Vimeo links for further video updates.

We finished in true style, visiting a very quiet and quaint coffee shop in Kildale, for hot sandwiches and cake. Chocolate cake and lots of it! I'm looking forward to doing this particular trip again. And that's just for the cake!

With the cancellation of the Wild Boar event, next week will still lead us to the Lakes, with the couple of trail centres there to be tried out.