A combination of awesome downhill skills, raw power and some NoTubes rims saw our team rider Dan winning the Ae Forest Avalanche Enduro last weekend. A full report will be up soon, but for now just enjoy the Euro music from the prize presentation…

A short cautionary tale for anyone indulging in X-treme offroad activities in the woods, someone will be along eventually to scrape you up andpack you off to hospital, but it might take longer than you think.

Last Sunday I was out with the normal riding crowd in Wharncliffe and on the first downhill run, dictated by tradition to be the Nemba course, I came round a corner and had to stop suddenly for what was obviously a victim of a serious stack lying on the ground. One of his friends was holding his ankle together (broken tib and fib just above the ankle) while the other had dialled 999 and, being not entirely familiar with the area, was trying to describe where they were to the operator.

Dave the crash victim has a leg splint applied.

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Avalanche trophy

The Avalanche Enduro was held in Kielder forest on the 25/26th May, it was a good event with decent weather and better than expected trails.

Saturday we checked out the event stages ridding them all twice, there was a mix of loamy bits but mostly trail center stuff which was sandstone based so sandy with lots of loose rocks. The stages were around 4 mins long and most required a fair amount of pedaling to keep the speed up. Stage 4/7 was used on Saturday afternoon as a prologue to seed riders for Sunday, this was probably the flattest stage so was a real suffer-fest but I got down it in a time better than it felt. This result did however mean an early start time on Sunday of 8:40 to head up the hill, the time allowances to get between stages were quite relaxed giving plenty of time at the start of the day and getting tighter as the event progressed, if you had a problem then things started to get interesting.

My first stage was the most fun in practice with sweet dry loamy bends as well as dark greasy woods sections but come Sunday morning it occurred about 2 coffees too early in my day and I minced my way down with lots of little mistakes.

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