Whiteless Pike And Rigg Beck
Mountain Bike Ride
Featuring: The Bread Lad.
Some idle web browsing one winter’s evening chanced upon a random video (here) of a Lakeland descent which fired the imaginations of the more imaginative amongst us, so, about three people that turned out to be and one of them could not get off work in time. Undaunted, me and The Bread Lad pencilled it into the itinerary for our three day expedition to the warmer, wetter side of the country; some research brought up a circular route which gave us the ascent (and descent) of Whiteless Pike and return to our base in Braithwaite via Rigg Beck. The ascent predominantly a gruelling hike-a-bike, ascending hundreds of feet with thirty pounds of bike across our shoulders, until Coledale Hause when things revert from vertical to merely steep. All in all it promised to be a good old-fashioned day out in the mountains with the potential to become big yellow helicopter epic - I stuck an extra quid in the Royal Oak mountain rescue box just in case.
We woke early after a comfortable night in our vintage caravan, the day dawned hot but hazy, in fact hot might be an understatement, sitting outside the caravan at eight am with sweat running down your back hot, just the day to be tripling the average ride ascent. Not without some trepidation and a great deal of map checking we left the campsite, slathered in sunscreen (in The Lakes) and followed the road to Braithwaite, turning off the Whinlatter Pass road mercifully low down, onto the gently uphill track to Force Crag Mine in the valley alongside Grisedale Pike. Soon we had reached the old mine in the shadow of Force Crag, the only way is up from here, we crossed the stream and shouldered the bikes for the long climb to Coledale Hause, many feet above, cruelling it levels out about halfway before revealing a continuation of zig zags scoring a vertical hillside, on and on we plodded, sweat running in our eyes and heat bouncing from the rocks around us. All the way up we jockeyed for position with a group young people being led up Grisedale Park, most of them were vocal in their displeasure at this torture being inflicted upon them; Esther Rantzen’s phone would have been red hot, if they could have got a signal. Inevitably the summit arrived and we were in the relative flatness of Coledale Hause, mist swirling around as we headed south between Grasmoor and Crag Hill to Wandope, riding all the way on decent tracks, pausing to chat to some walkers on Wandope our objective Whiteless Pike lay below us, connected by the ridge of Whiteless Edge, Crummock Water barely visible through the haze to our right. Crossing the ridge, with sheer drops to each side was exhilarating before another brief carry took us to the summit of Whiteless Pike for lunch and mutual congratulation.
And then we were off, miles of gravity-assisted riding between us and Buttermere, a few sections came under the “discretion is the better part of valour” category, our descending was by no means flawless but we reached the bottom largely unscathed accompanied by the smell of burning brakes. Even with the haze, the views were distracting, narrow singletrack and eye-catching vistas not necessarily a good combination when travelling at the sort of speed which may be considered unwise for someone approaching middle-age. The return route ought to have been a more sedate pedal along the Rigg Beck valley but due to some erroneous cartography (or, less likely, poor map reading) the track we began on moved a few hundred feet up the hillside without telling us. Eventually we regained it, via a debilitating carry up a near-vertical hillside in a baking hot, windless valley. It would be nice to say this was our only mistake but further on, at a bifurcation in the track (not marked on the map), we had a fifty/fifty chance, after traversing scree fields and woodland and being no closer to the track we could plainly see below us, realisation dawned and we cut our losses by blundering down a loose slope, hanging on to stunted trees and clumps of heather to prevent a headlong tumble to the stream below. Bodies scratched and grazed, shoes full of scree and dead bracken, we reached the track we ought to have been on some time ago. But, working on the theory all good things are worth the struggle, the next two miles were cycling heaven, gently downhill, sinuous singletrack, carving through the valley to the road, a fitting end to the day’s offroad riding.
A couple of road miles later we were in The Royal Oak beer garden, so dirty, scratched and sweaty we looked as though we had just crawled the last 15 miles on our hands and knees. The mountain was definitely put in mountain biking today.
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