Thrunton Woods is a Forest just to the north of Rothbury in central Northumberland. Another paradise for walkers (me no likee) but also has plenty for the MTB enthusiast. There's plenty of easy fire roads for the meek and mild, but you can go tree bashing or rock plunging to your heart's content (or failure).

We get up there about once a month and so far this year the ground has been a wee bit claggy (that's sticky anywhere south of the Tyne). Still good fun, but the Crags are very hard work and getting down can be scary. After descending from the Black Crags there's a short swoopy section under the trees, pretty dark in there but John, Jason and I had a brilliant race through it down to the stream. You just have to remember to duck! I'll put some GPS mappings on here someday.

Sunday 10th July 2005

Geography Lessons changed forever!

Those of us who had no sleep on the night of Saturday 9th July due to 18 year old female fish offspring returning from Big Market at 3.15am would have seen Sunday turn from a grey early morning into a fabulous sun-drenched day. Far too hot for mountaineering with a 40lb backpack, but here we were doing it again. Terry was just about to leave to pick up Jason and Andy about 9.45am when the phone rang. It was Andrew, Tall One and Head of Geography from the Gollum's place of work asking if MidAirCrisis were carrying passengers on today's flight. Too right we were, all comers very welcome, so we arranged to meet him at Thrunton Woods at 11.00am. After a frantic dash to John's at Cramlington, the four of us were off to rendezvous with the Big Guy arriving at Thrunton's car park just as he was getting ready to leave, cursing the MidAirMen. 

All's well that ends well, and of the five of us (Andy, Jason, John, Andrew and self) crawled up the Green/Red trails for what seemed mile after mile in the ever-increasing heat approaching midday. The MidAirMeanies had forsaken their full-face helmets for this gentle troll around the woods so as not to scare off the visitor. The visitor who had come fully prepared with a full slick rear tyre, a real tarmac-hugging tread. Unfortunately, the only tarmac it would see today was already left way behind at the carpark entrance.
Regardless of that, and a missing middle chainring (sorry Andrew, forgot to take a look
at the problem) Andrew, known henceforth as Big Andy as opposed to Little Andy, was as quick as anybody pushing the massive but featherweight Trek 8000 up the steepening fireroads as we searched for the path to Heaven.     This was a long time coming, but we had some fun on the way watching as Little Andy suffered absolute hell with his clipless pedals but collected about ten varieties of fern and gorse bush for his rockery, one for each excursion he took into the scenery.     Towards the end of the ride he was becoming quite frustrated at sailing over the handlebars, but at least learned a valuable lesson - clipless = useless. 

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Sunday 11th December.  At last a decent squad headed out of town to tackle Thrunton Woods on a fabulous, mild, sunny morning. All the talk on the way was about David's and Terry's new bikes following the theft of their Coiler DL and Bear XT respectively a week ago. They're now fixed up with replacements, David's 2006 Coiler Deluxe (not Dee Lux any more!) due for delivery next Thursday and Terry's 2005 Coiler Special (with subtle additions) possibly before Christmas. More detail here.

So our merry little band of four (John, Andy, Jason and Terry) arrived at Thrunton around 11.00am, parking in the dip between the two high points of the trail entries so as to avoid a horrible climb at the end of the ride. The ground was very wet away from the initial fireroad climb but perfectly rideable and fast. Until we got atop the Crags, that is!

Our target was the Black Crags as usual, but to get there we decided to give The Hill a miss - we tackled this in July or August and five of us almost died on it with the effort and heat of the day combined. The Gollum, sounding as if he knew what he was talking about, said "go that way" so we did. Bad idea. We ended up a few hundred metres from the start of that terrible uphill, almost vertical carry.  So, it had another great idea - "head for the hill behind that one!", and "it'll not be such a climb". Cretin.  Anyway, the rest of the party, too polite to start an argument, followed Golly's given directions and we ended up, up, up and into deep purple moorland. Getting desperate after an hour or more, we even tried to ride over (through) some of it. This caused Jason an uncountable number of falls, luckily most of them into soft, fall-breaking heather. Caught a couple on video.

After the detour it sure looked like we were headed back to the foot of that dreaded climb, and so it transpired. Andy had a desperate time pushing and carrying the Stinky, although he seemed very pleased that he'd given away 1300 calories after the first hour and a half! Meanwhile John seemed unperturbed by the 46 lbs of dead weight from the Saracen Awol. Jason was best off as the Scott MC50 weighs the same as a wet lettuce, and Terry was lugging the sole surviving Golly machine aka Barracuda Special which wasn't far short of the weight of his beloved stolen Kona Bear. Jason's advantage was lost, however, by a hand injury suffered at work through the week (fell off a chair - and he was SITTING on it at the time!) and he must have landed on it at least ten times on this trek, courtesy of stupid clipless pedals. That should teach them not to listen to me any more.

We stopped just shy of the top for a late lunch break and disgusting, intimate, personal detail - type conversation about peoples' private lives. Here's John crying as he took the brunt of it this time.

After carrying the bikes up to the summit, much to the amusement and amazement of a couple of walkers struggling down, we dragged ourselves across the Tops in a howling gale and pretty wet, slippery conditions to the PayOff Point - the descent to the forest. We all fell at least once coming down the rock chutes, but Jason's last fall was a bad one, hurting the hand even more. That meant he had to nurse it down the last ragged drops and under the trees to the river, where even crossing The Log became an adventure, especially with Golly bouncing on the end of it. Both John and Terry suffered total loss of their mechanical rear discs, John in particular badly affected by this on the way down. Just to note, in three years this is the first time the Hayes HMX-1 discs have let me down. Hydraulics coming up for the Barracuda!

Couldn't say exactly how far we travelled because my computer did a double back flip with pike off the handlebars while lifting the bike over a fence, and straight into the river which was flowing pretty fast - gone! What a week for losing stuff.