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This
beautiful mistake
You really needed to get your hands on the scree but dragging and carrying a bike made this option quite difficult. With a superhuman effort I scaled the rock face to the left of the gulley my bike being held precariously by it's front tyre at one point dangling over the precipice and looking like it was headed back to the lake without me. Finally we summited and chatted with another group of clearly gob-smacked hikers then slipped off in to the clouds finally pedaling for the first time in two hours it wasn't to last however. The summit ridge was rough stuff studded with rocky outcrops and thousand foot drops which we avoided as best we could.
Visibility at this point was around fifty yards and a sweet little downhill was beginning to develop, some mistake surely?
With deep suspicion I checked the GPS and sure enough we were about to head off in completely the wrong direction on an illegal footpath. Back on track and in the opposite direction we hopped on and off the bikes scaling rocky crags and riding off-piste over tussocks and bogs. At some point the cloud lifted and the most beautiful views were revealed in a strangely unreal landscape resembling a painted fantasy movie backdrop; it was truly phenomenal. The time came when we would have to descend but the gradient was one in one and a half.
Vertigo
I had a couple of goes but it was basically suicide and I had to dump the bike on wet grass where braking was the worst and only option. Accidentally dislodging a rock which gathered speed I was worried it would hurt someone but it only hit Paul so that was alright. A second larger missile bounced lethally close to an unsuspecting sheep's nose, it looked up suddenly in a very human "what was that whoosh noise?" reaction then went calmly back to munching grass.
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Unfortunately this gradient continued with only short rideable sections for more than halfway down the mountain culminating in a large boulder choked gulley where a rope would have again come in handy. Finally on the foot of the mountain a proper trail develops and we started to flow, I held open a gate with a tasty little step down for Paul and Phil to fly through then chased after them finding the going increasingly tough as the path had been 'improved' with stone steps. By the time I caught up with them they had stalled on a tight turn with stepping stones. I squeezed by and cleaned the section with a victory whoop even though I had no idea why they had stopped. To keep the wheels turning is everything so they lost that little battle for whatever reason.
This joyous trail continued all the way down to the lakeside finishing at a difficult boulder slab so I dropped down off-piste on the grassy bank and waited for the others. Everyone had had a blast on it but now we would have to pay on the huge road climb back to the cars. The memory of the climb has mercifully faded but I didn't have much left at the top and I even declined an off road descent which would have added to the mileage as it was just too late in the evening.
Any takers for a
re-run?
Arriving home after midnight I slept the sleep of the dead. Certainly none of us would do the route again but we are left with some of the most intense and in a way pleasurable memories of any of the 'rides' that year. It was painful, an insane adventure, dangerous, beautiful, crazy and simply stunning. I won't forget it for a very, very long time.
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