Mountain Bike Ride
Rod, Tom.
Last day of ten days off, already. What day people don’t understand is a ten day break goes by just as fast as their weekend, doubtless the hours whizz by a lot faster for us than for those who spend their days off carrying the wife’s shopping bag around The Metrocentre or even worse, trudging round B&Q looking at paint or tiles. Just to ensure we do not have too much fun, the weather has reverted to seasonal average - better described as mediocre - which presently is grey, damp and windy with sunny intervals.
My companions from Hamsterley on Saturday, suitably dried out, rejoined me at Pinchinthorpe for a few miles around Guisborough Woods. Wind of Herculean velocity was forecast today, so a careful strategy of riding high in the tailwinds and low in the headwinds was planned - and on the whole it worked. But first we had to get high, for us today, this meant The Unsuitables, that infamous Guisborough Forest bridleway which stretches from Hutton Village to Hutton Moor. A mere 450ft ascent but it does feel much harder even though the present incarnation of The Unsuitables, a well-surfaced, open, gravel track is the best ever, a far cry from the tree-shrouded, muddy, rutted, monstrosity it was back in the day, when a descent could never be guaranteed to be without the odd tumble. Or maybe that was just me.
The mandatory NSP (natural stopping point) at the top was deployed while we regained the use of our lungs, before an excursion along a cheeky trail far too good to waste on walkers, despite the cunningly placed tyre traps in the paved sections. Soon we were back in the woods and revisiting the Lost World which was ridden rather more cautiously than last week where I lost a camera and gained a haematoma. The track is still obscenely muddy in parts; a legitimate reason to visit the bike shop in search of mud tyres - I think it may well be. I can hear the conversation with the wife in my head as we slide down the slope.
“But if I had some mud tyres I wouldn’t have a bad leg now and camera’s won’t keep getting smashed. You can’t put a price on safety - it says so on the posters at work.”
Some bits of the trail known as Nomad came next, which were only slightly less muddy, the big drop at the end of the second section claimed Tom’s front tyre, which gave us more mature gentlemen a good excuse for a rest, apart from fielding Tom’s loose possessions which the wind was busily trying to redistribute across North Yorkshire as he furiously fiddler’s-elbowed with his micropump. Wind at our rear, we set off again being casually propelled across the top of the woods, all the way to the Concrete Road, another name to strike fear into the hearts of Guisborough regulars, luckily our route was downward. Picking up the old rail track back to Hutton Village following the descent, we were now going against the wind but it was much less powerful owing to the lower altitude. With age comes wisdom and all that.
Still feeling fairly fresh we headed back into the woods to polish of the final section of Les’s as a finale to the day before the real finale which is, of course, the Branch Walkway cafe at Pinchinthorpe where more flirting with danger was done, in the form of a bacon sandwich, apparently now as hazardous as drinking TNT and smoking dynamite. (Buddy Guy, if you’re wondering.)
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