wales part ii

Sorry I haven’t got around to posting the second part of my wales trip, things have been a bit hectic with the return to work after a 5 day break, not to mention that I awoke on Wednesday morning with a shocking head cold that I’m only just starting to get rid of.

Our second mtb adventure was the descent of Cadair Idris, a mountain in Snowdonia with a towering height of 893m. This is one of the most popular mountain walks in Wales with thousands of people climbing to it’s summit via the northern fox’s path. More interestingly though is that a bridal way climbs to its summit on the southern side, allowing horses and mountain bikers to ride the mountain.

Of course with every descent, there is always an ascent, with this one starting at 37m above sea level. As Welsh farms tend to extend to the steepest part of a mountain, the first 600m was along well formed gravel farm roads, turning into grass single track in the upper areas. The last 300m of climbing join onto the main walking track, and are extremely rocky, proving very difficult to ride up, needless to say Sarah and I spent most of this with our bikes slung over our shoulders. It was so rock in fact, that we were a little concerned that it would near impossible to ride down. Tom and Sarah gave up a little too early, leaving their bikes about 50m shy of the summit, so I get bragging rights for actually getting my bike right to the top. A quick snack in the shelter at the top, with thirty other people, and then we were off.

The extra 50m that I took my bike up were useless, as they were way too much of a scramble to ride, but I was making a point after all. Much to my surprise, 90% of the decent was rideable, although I had put on a set of flat pedals, as rocky riding and clipless pedals are usually a bad combination. Once we made it back down to the farmland section it was time to really let things got and keep the fingers off the breaks. A top speed of 48Km on grass single track with the occasional big rock was pretty good I though, considering that the grass was very wet, a perfect opportunity to ease on the rear break and slide my tail around the switchback sections at speed.

After 150 minutes of climbing, the descent was complete in about 15 minutes. Some times you really think weather all that effort was worth it for 15 minutes……
Actually I didn’t think about it at all, the cheek to cheek smile and splattering of mud on my face had already told me that every cm of climbing was worth it!

Returning back to Porthmadog for my last dinner and a game of cards with Tom’s family was about all I had time as there was an early rise the next morning. My train back to London left at 8am and I had to be at Heathrow about 10 minutes after I got into Euston (never going to happen) to meet Emily, who was due to arrive that afternoon from Australia (via, Mexico City, Cuba and LA). I’ll fill you in on that a bit later though.

Pete