A Little One For A Rainy Day.

A Little One For A Rainy Day

Thursday 13th February 2020

Pinchinthorpe

La Mujerita

As weather forecasts go, it wasn’t the most inspiring, 90% chance of rain for most of the day but then again, only light rain and the wind speed has halved, so let’s have a ‘who dares wins’ day and get those bikes out. Me and La Mujerita today, the venue: Guisborough Woods, for the third time this week. La Mujerita not being one for acts of youthful folly on a mountain bike, the chances of a viral video clip such as Monday’s ride with The Youth produced, were pretty remote. Being the romantic sort and it is Valentine's Eve, I lashed out three quid to park in the visitor centre car park, so we could finish our ride at the cafe. Remarkably, the rain stopped as we unloaded the bikes, bonus, although the whole place was wetter than Whitney Houston’s last joint and the wind had teeth, as the saying goes.

Some new wooden sculptures have been placed outside the visitor centre, large representations of what happens to a certain part of a gentleman’s anatomy when he has been wearing padded cycling shorts for a few hours. I was impressed by the wood carvers vision, avant-garde subject matter and obvious knowledge of one of the little discussed aspects of cycling, until La Mujerita pointed out they are actually acorns. 

A couple of miles climbing on slushy fire roads, followed by a short slither up a muddy trail brought us to a nice track across the hillside below the Hanging Stone, this track is undulating with a steep downhill finish, scene of another of The Youth’s unscheduled flights but that’s another story. Like I said earlier, La Mujerita is far too cautious to be involved in any of that type of behaviour, another  illustration of why women live longer than men. More fire road climbing followed, with a couple of ‘interesting’ diversions, took us up to Highcliffe Nab, wearing its winter coat of green moss, there will not be anyone climbing those rock faces for a while. 

Still sticking to the fire roads, we headed down the hill, warily, patches of ice and snow still covering the road surface and kept descending until we reached the bottom track where the BMX jumps used to be. We swerved off into the woods, onto a fairly level track which weaves gently between the trees, where La Mujerita learned everything there is to know about riding over wet roots. According to Professor Google, the slipperiest substance known to man is BAM, a compound of boron, aluminium and magnesium, mixed with a little titanium boride, more than twice as slippery as teflon. If only those scientists had ventured out of their lab and tried riding a mountain bike over wet tree roots, they could have saved themselves a lot of time and money because an awkwardly angled root is going to take your front wheel away like a frog’s tongue snatching a fly out of the air. Soft tyres and technique will go so far but there will always be that one root slicker than a laundry chute in an ice hotel which will catch you out. 

My limited knowledge must have helped in some way because La Mujerita remained bruise-free for the whole ride. The waterfall behind Hutton Village looked particularly picturesque, a consequence of the excessive rain lately and I risked life, limb and wet feet to get a picture. 

Shortly afterward we were back at the visitor centre, sampling the delights of the cafe prior to wielding the bike wash spray gun, washing mud from our bikes. Considering it has been a short ride, the majority of which was on fire roads, the bikes looked as if they had been bog snorkelling. As we loaded the clean bikes back onto the car, the rain returned, bringing a few flakes of snow to join the party. We were warm, dry and finished our ride; double bonus.