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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It’s cold and dark outside and I’ve got the flu and haven’t ridden my bike in 2 weeks so I thought it was time to bring back some happy autumnal riding memories. This is from our 1 week away from it all in the Sierra Nevada (Spain) with switch-backs.com, some of the best trails I’ve ridden in a while in warm, sunny mountains.

Dan riding in the Sierra Nevada Spain

Even though theres only an hour in it, the clocks changing makes everything seem different from yesterday with longer shadows and brighter light.

On the left, sadly fascinated by our own shadows under Stanage.

Some shonky photos from a dangerous midnight liaison, not as dangerous as the night club where I got a nose bleed and 2 black eyes. For those not in the know (as I wasn’t) a bike derby is where you ride round and knock people off until someone’s left riding. Sounds OK in concept but on concrete with lots of drunk single speeders even the local yoof just watched from the sidelines while this years bike porn was discarded to make way for the latest sparkley thing next year.

Making the most of the sunshine we took a little spin around Blacka Moor, the recent cow invasion (conservation apparently) has lead it to smell more like a farmyard and given some of the new trails a bumpy surface but it was the dog poo on my front tyre and then helment that won out as the new fragrance of the day.

here’s Jon roosting for the camera in the cow free section

Not somewhere we go often, Cavedale, but it is a great descent. It starts off with a fast open grassy singletrack section before turning rocky and fast, then it stops being fast and just gets rocky. The middle section is pretty hard to ride, steep and with sharp rocks all over the place, and water running down all over the place, through a series of narrow gullies. Nice.

This photo is from the bottom section where it goes through a kind of gully, apparently it all used to be a cave and the roof fell in or something. Anyway it all ends in Castleton which is an ideal place for a mid- or post-ride toasted teacake.

It’s wet, it’s muddy, it’s rubbish outside and I haven’t ridden since Sunday so I thought I’d fix the website and put up some photos we took when the weather was nice. 12th of April in fact, over at Blacka with Dave.

And in a fit of photo-posting enthusiasm here’s some more, from the week before that, up somewhere near Ladybower / Edge of insanity.

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 4×4s (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.