Slacking Again.

Video of The Cold Moor Descent, click here

Loop De Loop

Another slack week, with only two rides, owing to family commitments rather than general bone idleness, fortunately the two days I was able to get out coincided with The Breadlad’s few hours of freedom. We met at a windswept and particularly cold Blakey Bank Top for a variation on the Rosedale Five Looper from a few weeks ago. Considering it is the penultimate day of June, there’s a definite nip in the air, we’re back to double or triple layers to keep warm. Faffing and prevarication were kept to a minimum today, the sooner we were pedalling, the sooner we’d get warm. A steady slog up the road, passing The Lion Inn, takes us to a bridleway which cuts rightwards across the moor, the ground still bone dry despite a few showers lately. With tailwind assistance we swept through the singletrack like a pair of cycling gods - Buddha and Ganesha. Our next stop was Fat Betty, a large selection of food offerings littered the top today, predominantly packets of free biscuits from hotel bedrooms but also a full pepper pot, in case a hungry traveller rocks up with a Bloody Mary that just needs a sprinkle of pepper to make it perfect, perhaps. A short but sweet section of rocky singletrack runs down to the Castleton road from Fat Betty, again, a joy to ride in the current conditions. After enjoying the singletrack, we looped around on the road to the start of the George Gap Causeway, a long track across William Hill (wasn’t that a bookies?) to Great Fryup Head. Parts of the bridleway feature well-preserved sections of the original stone ‘trod’, an ancient pathway roughly paved with flat rocks, which makes for some fun riding. When we reach the Cut Road, a wide track which runs around the head of Great Fryup Dale, we turn left and pedal gently uphill to Trough House, the old stone shooting hut has recently had a new tiled roof to replace the previous tin sheet affair. Velux windows and everything. It'll probably be an Airbnb next week, for those who can do without running water, sewerage, electricity or a nearby pub. I could manage without the first three but the pub would be a game-changer. Another road loop brought us to the next bridleway, the superb drop down to the old Rosedale ironstone railway line, as usual I’m keeping this one a bit vague so it doesn’t become a victim to overuse. Not that many trail centre weekend warriors would find their way up here, where there’s not a carefully groomed, safety-graded, signposted, piste in sight. We continued down the bridleway to visit the tea room at Dale Head Farm and replaced some of our expended calories, sitting out in the sunshine, it was definitely warmer this low down. There were a few familiar blue bags in the farmyard, the once ubiquitous Nitram fertiliser - it just shows they can manage to continue churning the stuff out without me. Not that I ever imagined I was indispensable, there are graveyards full of those deluded fools. There was a popular joke in my youth, the punchline of which was. “Tea break’s over, back on your heads.” Which was the situation we soon found ourselves in, panting our way up the hill from the cafe, back onto the railway. A more amenable climb - it is railway grading after all - took us around the head of the valley, the wind still bitter but the views along to Rosedale Abbey more than made up for a modicum of unseasonal discomfort. The Breadlad’s ever-present time constraints precluded a spin around the fifth loop, which is behind The Lion Inn and we headed back to our cars, which were still being buffeted by the wind at Blakey Bank Top.

Have You Ever Seen The Rain?

Last ride of the week and last ride of the month, I’ve managed to bag myself a brace of fellow riders today. The Breadlad was out again, joined by Rod, The Breadlad was his usual 15 minutes behind time, we’re beginning to suspect he has a paper round or a milk round to do before he’s allowed out. Today’s objective is to ride the Cold Moor Descent, starting from Lordstones and make a video of said descent. It was a day of coat: no coat decisions; definitely moisture in the air but is it enough to justify the boil in the bag experience of wearing a coat in June? For those unfamiliar with the area, Lordstones is a cafe and glamping spot in the shadow of Carlton Bank, across the road from Carlton Bank are three north facing hills, Cringle Moor, Cold Moor and Hasty Bank, the middle hill, Cold Moor, is at a right angle to the others and has a superb descent from it’s summit ridge to the tiny village of Chop Gate in the Bilsdale valley. Our ride starts on what we call The Fronts, a roller-coaster track which traverses all three hills, we ride this across Cringle Moor and Cold Moor before beginning the climb onto the wide ridge atop Cold Moor. The first bit of the bridleway is steep and unrideable (for us anyway) but soon levels out into a narrow singletrack through heather and bracken. On Cold Moor, we follow a wide path until it bifurcates, the right fork looks promising but is actually a dead end, as we have all found out the hard way in the early days of our mountain biking careers. The left hand path is the main event, following a dried stream bed downhill, rocky and loose, bringing back memories of Spanish riding for me and Rod. The stream bed turns to singletrack, descending some mounds to end at a gate. The character of the route changes here, becoming a series of vegetated gullies, still heading downhill, a couple of gate stops to calm us down, before finishing through a tunnel of tree branches, tyres cushioned by a nice loam surface, bringing us out at the church in Chop Gate. Marvellous as it was, we had barely covered five miles and there was the question of which route to get us back to Lordstones. Inevitably a significant amount of ascent would be required, whichever way we chose to go. After a brief discussion while shoving energy bars in our faces we decided to make for the summit of Carlton Bank, about 240 metres above us. It was a very gradual ascent, punctuated by occasional stops for panting and swearing, eventually we reached the trig point, the normal vista across fields to industrial Teesside and the North Sea lost in a pall of low cloud blanketing the horizon. On the way down, Rod, who is in the business of teaching people how to escape from downed helicopters, blazing wind turbines and the like, demonstrated the optimum way to jettison from a moving mountain bike; apparently it involves somersaulting ten metres down a bracken covered slope while trying to fight off a bike. He was unwilling to repeat his feat for the camera. Soon afterward we were sitting under an umbrella the size of a small island, pints and steaming concoctions of pastry-wrapped animal flesh before us, watching streams of water pouring off the canvas. Now that’s what you call timing - back minutes before the rain.