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.

> read more…

Here it is, we’ve been waiting for one of these for a long time. The latest and greatest upgrade you can make to a mountain bike (as long as there are no sheep around)… Reuben the trail hound.

He has no trouble keeping up, actually normally he forces his way past and mocks our feeble attempts to go fast off road, then rubs it in by launching off 10ft drops with ease (we’re trying to discourage that one).

We’ve only had him a few weeks after getting him from Rotherham Dog Rescue but he is getting the hang of riding already and has already found several new trails. With a bit more practice I think he’ll out-run us too.

last August we mentioned that we’d been told by the Forestry Commission that we couldn’t use Whancliffe woods to hold a round of the Midlands XC series this summer, infact they wern’t going to allow any more events in the woods at all after complaints from walkers, its to busy and it disturbs the wildlife. After quite a bit of discussion and lobbying from other parties we left it be after being told that “we don’t use Wharncliffe for racing anymore ( apart from a one off charity event).”

Guess what- its not a one off theres another one ! Excellent so some downhillers can have a piss up and ride around in fancy dress (in aid of charity of course) whenever they want but no organised events please. Why wern’t they told to use Sherwood Pines like the rest of us?

I don’t think that this will suprise many people, Forestry are rapidly going down in peoples estimations with irratic trail support and extortionate licence uplift fee and capitalising on other peoples hard work.

outraged of Hillsborough

After seeing the preview (post below somewhere) of the new Collective movie in Wharncliffe we thought we should go and check the trail out. One word: awesome. Big drops, big berms and massive piles of rocks, it must have taken months to build and a lot of heaving materials around. It looks nowhere near finished yet either, the main line kind of finishes half way down and there are a few more in progress. I think we’ll be going back there.

The picture’s Wharncliffe, from a couple of weeks ago, but not the new stuff.

Looking around the t’interweb today I came across an article on the MBUK site about The Collective filming Steve Peat in Wharncliffe, we like Wharncliffe but it’s almost getting boring now with articles in any magazine owned by Future Publishing having regular “Pro Rider Simon Richardson in Wharncliffe” features or “Pro Rider Will Longden in Wharncliffe” features.

Now it seems even The Collective want a piece of Wharncliffe action, which unfortunately means us having to buy yet another movie so we can see how our local trails are meant to be ridden. Hopefully it’s a bit more exciting than the samples on the MBUK site (click here) – 40mb each of a cameraman standing around and Steve Peat riding past in the background, not very exciting and I don’t recommend spending any significant amount of your life downloading them. I do feel the need for a quick Phreeride session to check them out in real life though…