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.

Surprisingly, the ambulance service don’t seem to have any plan in place as to how to get into the woods and so the ambulance duly turned up at the Intermet entrance 2 miles away with instructions for the crew to find their “customer” somewhere in Wharncliffe, behind a locked FE gate they had no key for. I rode there to find the medics a bit puzzled as to how to find the victim in 10 square miles of woodland but fortunately the owner of the house understood my directions, posessed the approproate key, and volunteered to drive them there in his landrover.

Helicopter rescue in Wharncliffe

After administering some kind of pain-relieving gas and a leg splint, the ambulance men’s next task was to summon the air ambulance to get Dave the crash victim out of the woods. Several incorrect radio codes from the central control and 1 hour later they turned up with a BBC cameraman in tow so keep your eyes peeled on the TV schedules and you might see an action shot of me snapping off twigs to make way for everyone else doing the heavy stretcher lifting.

Anyway Dave’s friends texted to let us know he is recovering well, and I guess he’s looking forward to being (in)famous.

After that we rode off to do a few trails, slightly slower than we might otherwise have. Unlucky Steve was riding faster than everyone else so here’s a quick movie of him riding the No Human trail.

Unlucky Steve on the No Human trail from Jon Webb on Vimeo.