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Next Saturday I’ll be going back to Nidderdale in North Yorkshire to do a pretty tough mountain bike ride with some guys from MTB Britain. I’ve been here twice before, once last year and once the year before.

Last September I went there with some of the MTB Britain guys and had a thoroughly enjoyable time – it was hard work, taking just over 6 hours to do the route: MTB Britain Nidderdale 2 route / Nidderdale Photos September 2005

In 2004 it was a different story though. The route had some overlapping sections but was fairly different. This was the one supplied by Tracklogs – I had it loaded up on the GPS and most of the day went very well – the first mishap was on a particularly rocky downhill where I went over the handlebars and landed face down in the rocks – the bike was also upside down with the GPS having hit some of the rocks and cracked the screen. It needed repairing but it was still usable apart from about a third of the screen so it was still ok for navigation.

Later in the day though we started going down a path that looked like it was veering away from where we should be. We had a discussion and decided that it’ll probably sort itself out but it increasingly looked wrong – it wasn’t possible to ride after a while and it was more like climbing, we ended up going past the trig point on Whernside at 701 metres above sea level – we definitely weren’t supposed to be there! So, we started aiming for the bridle path we were supposed to be on. Unfortunately, the direct line between us and it took us behind a large dam and between the top of Whenside and the dam was a very marshy boggy area with lots of hidden streams going towards the dam. Crossing this took hours. A seemingly very short distance but progress was soul destroyingly slow.

I’d sometimes step forwards only for my leg to sink up to my waist and pull it out – sometimes with my footwear missing which I had to retrieve and replace – the bike was used as ballast to lay flat on things and use to pull me or for balance. This really wasn’t pleasant! The difficulty and slow progress was bad enough, but this was less than a year after I’d been diagnosed with diabetes and I was conscious that my food supply was almost gone and I really didn’t want to be in the middle of nowhere and go hypoglyceamic. We eventually saw some people walking on the bridle path we were aiming for – it didn’t seem far away but it took a lot of effort and time to get to it. When the ground eventually became solid again I was so happy – it’s hard to describe how happy but I could have thrown myself on to it and kissed it!

There was still around 45 minutes to an hour of cycling left to get back to the car and I was all but exhausted. When we eventually got back to the car, around 10 hours after leaving it in the morning, we quickly sorted all of our stuff out, got changed and headed off in to civilisation and found a convenience store where lots of food was purchased and we made pigs of ourselves to great relief.

I found a map in PDF format of the route taken on the day and we covered 55.2 Km, 1,467 Metres of height gain (over 4,800 feet) (these stats from the recorded tracklog).

I learnt a valuable lesson that day – don’t ignore the maps and the evidence that it’s all going wrong!

As funny as this sounds in retrospect, it’s funnier when you include the fact that the previous week I was up in Ribblehead, North Yorkshire doing a route called Tour of Whernside. I followed the route to the letter that time and ended up spending about an hour and a half going through a bog and sinking to my waist! When I emerged from the other side I looked like I’d just crawled out of a swamp – much to the amusement of some passers by who told me the same thing had happened to them on that path years before so they don’t use it any more! It was a glorious sunny day and I looked like some kind of mud monster. I then took a wrong turn and managed to add an extra 500 metres of climbing on to my route bringing the total to around 1500 metres of climbing again and around 50Km of distance. So happy to see the car again at the end of that day! Little did I know the following weekend I’d be back up there and it’d be worse!

Overall score: North Yorkshire 2 – Dave 0.

It is a beautiful part of the world though: Nidderdale photos / Ribblehead photos / Ingleton photos

So, next Saturday is Nidderdale, which is on my goal list for the year. The Tour of Whernside is on the list as well – although I’ll be missing the bog section out and not taking a wrong turn next time!

Bonus link: The MTB Britain web site has some great helmet camera videos, including two Nidderdale ones: MTB Britain Helmet Cam Videos