Tuesday night in Area 51

I had a really good ride last night. I hooked up with some people from the Freeride’n store and hit some ‘illegal’ trails up at Area 51. I do not normally condone illegal trail riding, but in this case most of these trails are in a publicly accessible forest, and there used to bike trails all through this section of the forest, untill things all got a bit commercial – enough said trying to justify myself, I really shouldn’t have been riding there anyway, but I did and I probably will again.

There was 7 of us riding, 3 groms and 4 adults. I took the SS though I wasn’t sure what the climbing would be like and from experience of riding there in the past when it was allowed I did expect to have to walk some sections.

We met at 6.30 PM at the home of one of the rider leader and then pedalled for a KM or so up the road to a downhill walking track. The track was fun, though I am always a bit nervous riding downhill trail for the first time in the dark, especially when it is A) designed for walkers and may have steps and B) I suspected it was close to the edge of a cliff. It was a nice wide trail and pretty tame, be a lot more fun next time. At the bottom of the track we rode some more sealed road the hill to the gannet colony track. I haven’t been there for a while and was surprised that after a 100 meters of gentle climb to the top the track had been stepped all the way back down to the bottom car park. The steps were in sets of 4 with about 4 metres of flat between them, there was probably 10 sets of steps down which was the longest run of steps I have done, enjoyed it, though I will say I was a bit worried about blowing the rear tube as I was running very low pressures from riding in the sand and was not expecting to be riding more wooden framed steps.

After the steps we rode back up the road and into the forest itself, having a bit of local knowledge certainly helped as I have always gone in from the bottom road which has meant a steep climb/push to the top, but we snuck around the easy gradient sealed road and in the back way almost at the top. There has been an awful lot of trail work in this end of the forest, seeing as we are not supposed to be riding there a lot of effort had gone into developing some gnarly short downhill tracks with some quite carefully constructed jumps, including road gaps. We did not do anything that serious and soon dropped back to sea level and rode some very vague tight twisting shingle track back to the beach road and then back to the cars.

All up it was a 2 hour ride, damn good fun as all rides are, cool to ride with some different people and some different trails and not take any of it too seriously. I will definitely be back for some Tuesday night rides.

Listening to some old "shoegazer" bands - Chapterhouse and My bloody valentine today.