Sunny, deserted, dry, warm, cheeky trails. Not the sort of thing you can look forward to on the average weekend in the Peaks when the whole place is over-run by climbers (ok), happy walkers (ok), angry walkers (ok since you can mock them), morons wandering out of tea shops not looking before stepping into the road (not ok), and eejits driving far too big 4x4s (need culling).
But it is the sort of thing you can find if you go off on a Thursday evening for some dirt action around Ladybower reservoir. Normally prime hunting ground for the greater crested Gimp„¢ and their Santa Cruz / Whyte / Bike du Jour laden roof-rack, the place is deserted outside of official visiting hours and we like to take advantage of it.
So it was that we headed up for an aperitif up to Lockerbrook to shake out the cobwebs, or in Dave’s case, a nose-full of snot and from there on to the main event, the Edge of Insanity (again, worth a „¢). Steep, fast and in places fairly difficult it’s a lot of fun, as you’ll see from the pictures once I’ve worked out how to put more than one at a time up. Anyway the point is that of course it’s a totally cheeky trail especially with the uber-cheeky extension sprue, and just not the sort of thing you’d want to go about doing at weekends. In fact normally you’d probably get bludgeoned by a National Front Trust or parks warden using either an unspecified blunt instrument or the full force of the law (whichever was handiest) for riding it but on a Thursday evening, it was amazing. Views to Sheffield in one direction, and far across the Peaks to the other with some sweet trails and even the oppotunity to practice some knarly rock sections (where Dave faceplanted losing 2 kitkats and an orange).
The real point I suppose is that I can’t work out why there are so few people around in the middle of the week. Sure people have jobs and bills to pay but where are all the tourists, people who work there, people who got off work early and went out to the hills for some frolicing, unemployed people, retired people… none of them are there, they all wait till the weekend when everyone else goes and make it an overcrowded mele of frustration and traffic jams, why not spread it out just a bit? It’s a lot nicer that way.
It was truly righteous. Sweet trails, beautiful sunset, good roosting buddies.
As for the kitkats and the orange: sometimes glory must come at a price. I will never forget those brave little fellas.
And the absence of people: I often wonder if living out in the peak would be as good as it seems, or if you just spend your days working to pay for the view that you never see because you’re at work. That evening was priceless and we didn’t pay a penny for it (especially since Jon and Bec began retching at the prospect of paying the national trust/front/reservoir society £3 to park, hence relocating the JRA lovebus to a layby). When I was a wee XC whippet growing up down t’pit in deepest, flattest Nottinghamshire I happened upon a copy of MBUK that a visiting gentleman from the south had left behind. Not being able to read, and living most of our days underground and therefore evolving the eyesight of a mole, us Nottinghamshire folk had no use for this southern invention. But I was different, and I seized the magazine and put it under the matress along with my other works of literature. To cut a long story short, there was an advert in the mag for Pace Research (as it was then, back in the days of Zak Tempest and Tim Gould, who went on to even greater fame in the band ‘Take That’ under the stage name ‘Gary Barlow’) and the advert showed a misty blue evening in the hills. I thought to me sen ‘one day I will live and ride somewhere like that’, and on Thursday an even better version of the advert unfolded in one diretion, and Sheffield, my home for the last 10 mainly great years, in the other. The moral of this story for those of you who are still awake: Store kitkats and fruit items in a zippered compartment.
But Phatboymint loves Santa Cruz, i saw him riding one today. :)
Would that be the Heckler with the dubious shock? Either that or there are 2 phatboymints in the world which is a disturbing thought.
Phatboymint has turned to the darkside. He’s now Phatbotrumnraisin. What’s wrong with a velcro compartment too? You fastener fascist!
Aye, that be the one, and the dubious forks. Fox my oversized a^*e.