Weekend away

One of the pic­tur­esque scenes from Sunday morn­ing, where the Munda Biddi trail crosses Icy Creek

Well I sur­vived the week­end in, with barely a scratch, other than a couple of close encoun­ters with the thorns on black­berry bushes that were over­hanging the trail in a couple of places and a grazed knee with the sil­li­est of get offs. Approach­ing a fire road there was a shal­low ditch to take the rain run off, I assumed I have enough momentum to roll through the ditch without a prob­lem, wrong. If had less momentum the bike would of stopped dead. Instead I had the right amount of momentum, for the front wheel to stop in the ditch and the rest of the bike with me attached to keep mov­ing for­ward. I don’t know what exactly happened but instead of going over the bars and land­ing on my face or worse on one of my bad shoulders, I landed on my knees with the bike hit­ting me in the back. No injur­ies except a grazed knee and bruised ego, not that most of the people I was rid­ing with haven’t seen me do stu­pid things before, but there was a bunch of young down­hillers about to push their bikes up the trail I had just come down.

Over­all it was an inter­est­ing week­end, early Sat­urday after­noon was spent explor­ing trails in the Lane Poole Reserve, unfor­tu­nately most of the trails we found were built by down­hillers, requir­ing you to carry your bike uphill and requir­ing a cer­tain lack of san­ity to ride down at speed. After a quick swim and a snack it was time for an 18km twi­light ride. Every­one expec­ted the ride to last a couple of hours and the last hour would be using lights. After it took more that two hours to cover the first 6 kms of steep ascents and steep des­cents that was often bey­ond my rid­ing abil­ity. Luck­ily we then reached the altern­at­ive route back to camp, 10 kms along the Munda Biddi trail (A cyc­ling trail that runs 332 kms from Mundar­ing to Col­lie and will be exten­ded to reach Albany, the qual­ity of the trail var­ies a little, but it is equi­val­ent to fire­trail). It was an inter­est­ing ride back to camp on the Munda Biddi as the bat­ter­ies on most peoples lights ran out of power, pick­ing your line using some­body else’s light and hop­ing you spot the potholes and rocky out­crops. The advant­age of rid­ing a full sus­pen­sion bike was how well it soaked up the hits from the potholes and rocky out­crops you did not see or could not to avoid.

Sunday morn­ing, and nobody got out of bed for an early morn­ing ride, so I did a little explor­ing, the Munda Biddi trail on the other side of our camp and a trail along the Mur­ray river, neither were chal­len­ging rides, but it was the scenery that mattered. After break­fast, we broke camp and most of headed to Turner Hill XC track. Other than one long hill climb which was bey­ond me after a week­end of cyc­ling, it was the type of cir­cuit I like rid­ing, lots of sweep­ing single­track, a couple of des­cents to scare me and couple of climbs to make me work.

Got back home and found out some­body delib­er­ately lit a couple of fires in Dwell­inup, which caused major dam­age. I can not under­stand why some­body would delib­er­ately start a fire that dam­ages such nat­ural beauty and put at risk the lives of the volun­teer fire­fight­ers who give up their time to fight such fires

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Personal, cycling . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.