Midaircrisis Geordie Mountain Bikers update September 2006

Coming out for a ride? E-mail us bailout@midaircrisis.org.uk

Sunday 20th November. Another fantastic morning, if a little cool. Again the Three MidAirKateers took to the Stanes. I'm very sore today. Both wrists feel broken, both elbows and both shoulders feel dislocated. Reason? Innerleithen/Traquair Black XC/Downhill trails. Ignore all that, though (I know you will) as we may now have a new 7 Stanes Favourite. Today our trip coincided with an organised cross-country race. No, it didn't take us by surprise, we knew the event was on. What the event did, naturally, was to mark out its own trail for the competitors. This resulted in many diversions and blocked-off trail heads. The race arrows covered a lot of the normal trail markers. Top and bottom of that was we didn't follow the normal route. Not sure if "lost" is appropriate, we just rode different trails this time.

After the expected long, tortuous drag towards the top of the climb, where Golly insisted on a straight-up, near-vertical attack cutting out the hairpins as we were pushing the bikes anyway, we bumped into a few fellow North-Easterners (Durhamites). They had just descended on a trail we hadn't seen before so we took their advice and turned up off the fireroad to find its starting point. Reaching the top of another hard, but thankfully short climb we found it, but The Gollum thought we should continue to try for the top of Minch Moor, from which the whole downhill experience should have started. We did tackle a heather-covered trail for about a mile towards the little specs moving around on Minch Moor but stopped and turned back after we'd agreed we were losing too much height. 30 wasted minutes down to Terry! We'd passed another split in the trail on the way, so half way back we took that one, which had the usual warnings about not crying if you break a leg on it.

Those warnings were well founded, and we found this short, steep section wet, slidy, narrow and potentially damaging to MidAirCrisis members without Cycling Proficiency badges. Jason was out front and we lost sight of him fairly quickly when Andy stopped to figure out the best way down. See the video. Terry took over weaving through the trees until we caught Jason who had stopped to admire a six-foot drop off. A short break for photos and off again, Terry immediately falling gracefully, but no damage done (too slow!). At the bottom the trail was taped-off for the race, but Jason had a good look left and right, ducking the tape to finish the steep drop off the trail end. Terry caught him up being a bit more cautious with race traffic, then we waited for Andy to arrive. He arrived in style - see the vid.

We continued up the fireroad for another mile or so and emerged at the top of the Plora Craig Contour Trail, the rocky downhill singletrack section. Last time here John knocked me off! This time, after we'd watched some unfortunate soul sail over his handlebars from the top, we rushed it as fast as we could, and were all completely knackered when we reached the lowest part and its rock step-ups. After the next climb it was decision time again, and more fireroad to push the bikes up. Bit cold up here last night! Strangely enough, we ended up back at the top of the Contour, approaching it from the opposite side to Minch Moor, but this time took the right fork in search of the Freeride track. At last we were correct with our directions and this was maybe the tastiest bit of trail we'd ever ridden. It's super-fast with horrible decisions to make on the way down - like "will I do this double or will it kill me?", so we rode over most of them without leaving the ground. The berms are dead fast and you can maintain a pretty high speed down here. At the bottom it was grins all round, and a hitherto subdued Andy was beaming. They both wanted to do it again, but with the sky getting darker we still had Caddon Bank to contend with, so they were overruled by Judge Gollum.

"I'm not fallin on this pig" Andy takes the safe way down Caddon Bank...

Just joking, he got down as fast as we did, bringing up the rear. This thing really does epitomise the word "RollerCoaster". Obviously, the Yanks will have them bigger, faster, meaner and deadlier. But we've got this gem of a thing, right on our doorstep. It's utterly fantastic, and is the perfect climax to any ride. All we have to do now is figure out how to get to the start of the Freeride track without too many push-ups and we can play all day until someone does get hurt. Just hope it's not icy when we come back next.

Gateway to Pleasure... And that Pig of a Hill...