Mtb-routes-scotland Blog

Its been too long - but I am Back! 22/10/07

Warm Winter Welcome

While everyone else is moaning about the dark nights, the cold weather and so on, I cant but help shiver with excitement at the winter to come. It’s one of the best times of the year. In days gone by it would mean weekends going skiing at Glenshee, but alas no more. But now instead of hanging my bike up for the winter to replace it with skis, its time to lube up and charge up – lets get the gears ready and the lights functional because winter is here. And you know what that means, its time to get on that bike.

There can be few better things than biking on a cold dark night. The lung busting cold air biting into your lungs, the slippery feel of mud and the year’s discarded reddened leaves make even some of the easiest ascents a challenge, and as your lights cut a tunnel of light through the imposing darkness of the forest, there is the ascent to look forward to.

As gravity pulls you through the darkness of the trail down the hill, the same cold air tries to rip the skin off your s already damp cheeks (the ones below your eyes). Eyes stream as the tears are sucked from you eyes as the cold air burns your cornea, the tyres try and fight for grip – but it’s a losing battle – and all this with only 10 yards of vision ahead of you.

It doesn’t matter how strong your lights are, there is a limit to how far they can see. Sure they may be brighter, but the brighter lights means more light reflected off what you see, this in turn means your pupils constrict, fighting the adrenaline that makes them want to dilate, and this means that you can see even less outside the field of glare that the lights cast. It’s simple physics. Light travels in a straight line. Sure it might disperse, refract and reflect, but it will not see around corners. This means that sharp hairpin bends and dips in the trail are ridden on faith alone.

The winter blues and S.A.D. – you can kiss goodbye to them

Of course as an added bonus Christmas means you can stock up on buffs, new lights, mud guards, gloves, hats and long johns. So what are you waiting for – get that letter to Santa written and get on that bike.

The First Instalment - the site has been up and running 2 months now. 21/08/07

Why bother?  What possessed me to embark on setting up mtb-routes-scotland.co.uk, especially when you consider that setting up a website is costly in terms of money and perhaps more so time. Well I  (like you presumably) was looking for places to go on my mountain bike, and after becoming bored with the same old routes, turned to the internet to find more places I could go with a bike. Where could I go, which forests had good trails, which Munros could I get up and down on a bike without having to carry my bike all the way up and down and what other nuggets were there out there.  There is nothing more frustrating having looked at a OS map and decided to try what looks like it might be a good route only to find that it is either too rocky, peaty, marshy, muddy etc etc to be able to take a bike along it. Thus I hoped the internet might help. I was disappointed. Yes there were some routes, but not many and it took hours of trawling to try and coordinate where I might want to go with a route that suited me in terms of challenge and distance

I would love to say "hurrah, the waiting is over, welcome to my site", but I am realistic. The site is in its infancy and I plan over the coming weeks, months and years to add to the site. Unfortunately I am a little bit limited as one of the condition that 'her indoors' sets is that I must give the dogs a long walk if I am going out on my bike, so usually I try and kill two birds with one stone. Thus, very few routes will involve any roads, and likewise I tend to avoid hills and land with livestock on it. I am allowed out to play without the dogs occasionally, but most of the times its nice to have them along and its an added bonus trying to persuade the dogs to move out of the way at the same time as realising you are on the verge of losing control on a steep rocky section.

This site is free and will always remain so; I try to rake back some of the money I have spent on the site from the ads, but at an average rate of one click per day amounting to about 10p a day I shan't be bringing my retirement forward 30 years on the proceeds of this site. That said and done I have tried not to make the ads too obtrusive, but I would appreciate it if you could right click and open one of the links from the Google ads bar on the right in a new window. It costs you nothing, and you don't even need to be interested in the sites. I have to say though I am sorely tempted by some of the ads for mountain biking holidays in the alps that appear.

Right I need to go and write up my route from this morning - a ride up into the ski area of Glenshee - and the great thing about Glenshee is  - there is no snow in the winter anymore so you can bike all year round these days.