The Last Bit Of October.
October 2020 can be summed up by one three letter word, wet and a lot of four letter words, dull, drab, grey and slop being some of the less profane. And still we ventured out, over 200 quality (?) off-road miles ridden with ascent ramping up towards 25,000 feet. A trip to Swaledale, was even managed, to ride the Gunnerside route, The Pensioner's legacy, undoubtedly the best ride he ever devised. As usual, the titles are the Strava routes, Strava pseudonym Lordy Lardy.
For those who don't do words, video here.
Made It Back Before The Proper Rain.
The Ginger One found a small window between overtime shifts and Mark Twain's "good walk spoilt" to join me in Kildale station car park on a damp, drizzly and windy morning. The dubious puddle next to the toilet block is not quite so obvious now everywhere else is covered in water and mud; it is a permanent fixture though, even in what passes for drought in North Yorkshire. Owing to his irrational aversion to Guisborough Woods, our attention was directed towards Baysdale, beginning with Three Sting Hill, from Little Kildale to Warren Farm, passing the Leven Vale chimney and up The Field Of Heavy Gravity - extra gravitational today because it is so soggy. After a bit of a carry over the moor, we dropped down the rocky track to Three Barns in Baysdale and revised the original plan, which was to cross the valley and climb up to Great Hograh Head, continuing to Armouth Wath, following the old coal road to Burton Howe, then taking the Cleveland Way back to Kildale. Most of this would be uphill into a fierce headwind, with the odd lashing shower to make our joy complete. A bit of local knowledge and we were soon being pushed through the puddles along the Baysdale bridleway to the road above Hob Hole, where a stiff but again wind-assisted tarmac climb took us to the end of Percy Cross Rigg. For The Ginger One, we were straying dangerously close to Guisborough Woods, which, for some, reason he abhors (and he’s from Darlington, a town where the internal combustion engine is considered new-fangled). We went through the gate and around the Lonsdale Bowl, this green and pleasant land transformed into smeary Degas landscape of grey and brown, a splash down Fingerbender Bank was followed by Andy’s Track, in surprisingly good fettle despite the meteorological abuse of the past month. Grinning like a pair of damp, mud-spattered baboons, we arrived at Gribdale, took a deep breath and blasted up the fire road to Captain Cook’s Monument, blasted, of course, being a relative term. A brief pause and we were plummeting down again, on a slightly overgrown trail called Down The Wall, wet heather, wet bracken, wet grass, wet pine trees, Wet, Wet, Wet with extra wet, all generously sharing the moisture with us, we couldn't have been any more hydrous if we’d been cycling through a kelp forest. A straightforward fire road and tarmac downhill blast got us back to the car park just as the drizzle transformed to proper rain. “Who dares wins, Rodney.”
The Gunnerside Route.
The Pensioner’s legacy, I don’t believe the departed can control the weather. Or can they? Was that a ghostly tittering I could hear, or just the sound of persistent rain bouncing off my ear drums? It is half term or something, one of those weeks when teachers are let out on licence, like well-behaved prisoners, so long as they promise to come back and not kill anyone while they are out, which is how I came to be meeting SuperBri in a rain-lashed Gunnerside, ready to introduce him to the delights of the Gunnerside route. It didn’t rain the whole way round, it didn’t rain most of the way round, in fact, the sun came out later and things became almost pleasant, which must be considered as a reward for our persistence. The trails, however, were a different story, anything with a width less than 30cm was transformed into a watercourse, Alfred Wainwright described the Howgill Fells as looking like a herd of sleeping elephants, today the Yorkshire Dales were like a herd of perspiring elephants, rivulets of sweat pouring down grey flanks, swelling the becks feeding the river Swale. The actual route has been described many times in this blog, no point going over it all again, suffice to say the clip-on mudguard which lives in my car boot saved me from being a lot wetter, we couldn’t have rode through more water if we’d been on jet-skis. Most of the tracks are remnants from the old mining days, tending towards rock and gravel, which, thankfully, kept mud-plugging to a minimum but grassy patches were like wet sponges, oozing water as we rode over them. Despite the brevity of the route, there is a lot of climbing to be done and we were glad to find a café open in Gunnerside at the end of the route. Once again we had taken on the weather and won - if you can call being soaking wet and covered in mud winning. Just an average day in the life of a retiree I’d say.
A Day Of Drizzle.
Meteorology seems to be joining astrology in the made-up, pseudoscience bollocks printed in the media and blighting the internet if the latest forecasts are anything to go by. Several sources told us, with complete confidence, that today would be drizzly for a couple of hours in the early morning, clearing to give a cloudy but dry day. Maybe in Cairo or somewhere, North Yorkshire had consistent, persistent and insistent drizzle, which did actually stop for around twenty minutes, just long enough for me to get the drone in the air for a few last bits of footage for the video. The route is hardly relevant, Great Ayton, through Guisborough Woods, Percy Cross Rigg and back to Great Ayton. Perpetually dull and wet but still superior to the alternative - which is not being out, possibly trapped at home, or work, or, horror of horrors, walking round a windowless shopping mall with the consumer clones, George A Romero’s vision, just stopping short of the brain-sucking flesh-eating bit, all believing the latest gadgets or designer labels will improve their lives when all they need to do is go to one shop - a bike shop - and all their problems will be solved. Or maybe just beginning.
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