RSF - The Off Road Cycling Club

The Adventure Starts Here

2019

“The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community.” — Ann Strong, US author

 

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You might think that supplied with a GPS track, a 1:25K IGN, clear signposting and nearly a hundred years of combined navigational experience it should be impossible to get lost. So when the track had little by little evolved from “isn’t this fun” into “how long have we been pushing, I thought it was supposed to be easy”, it could not have been that we were lost, it was because “They” had done something
A good holiday should start with a good exercise. So I left the Tweedside campsite and made for the Innerleithen MTB trails at Elibank. To test my fitness, and for a warming up, I first took the push-up from the forest road to the start of the downhill trails. I managed to cycle quite a lot of it but due to the previous night’s storm some fallen trees had blocked the trail at places. On top of Plora Rig (474 mtrs) I turned my nose to where the Tweed flows and made the acquaintance of Death by Mud!
I mentioned something of Mytholmroyd in an earlier article about cycling in the Calder valley. This village, a large one but perhaps not quite big enough to be called a town (unlike its book-end neighbours Hebden Bridge and Sowerby Bridge) is on the strategic valley route between East Lancashire and West Yorkshire. Mytholmroyd’s toponymy suggests that it once was “a clearing where two rivers meet” – but it could easily have been one of those fictional comedy northern place names where cap-wearing, whippet- loving, gorm-starved Yorkshiremen shuffled back and forth from t’ mill
The concept of Argentina was, above all, comforting to me. I liked being in Argentina. The people were mostly friendly and interesting. Camping is easy. You can buy croissants and Danish pastries in the bakeries. The steak is tender. The bike shop can fix the four broken spokes on my back wheel. Never mind that this, the last town in Argentina, La Quiaca, separated from its Bolivian twin Villazón by only a narrow ravine, was run-down, dried up, monochrome, and half boarded up. I had a strong feeling that whatever lay on the other side of the little stone bridge had to be worse.
Imagine, its the end of March in 1919, its snowing heavily, its bitterly cold, you can either stay in a cosy pub with a roaring fire and order another pint, or you can choose to ride your 1919 style bicycle up and over that big hill in the waist deep snow, oh and please bear in mind that is taking place less than a year after you’ve been home from serving (voluntarily) in the first world war, what would you do? Fast forward one hundred years and here we are in that same pub to celebrate that decision to go out into the snow, that regardless of the locals advising to stay a small number of them chose to go out and do it, Wayfarer as he became known was amongst them and he wrote about their adventure
Thursday 27 May 1976 was a scorcher in the Cairngorm mountains. That was when I last cycled from Coylumbridge, up the rough track which wound its way through Glen Einich to Loch Einich and I loved every single sweltering inch of it. I was 20 years old and, in those days, an unusually young member of the RSF. My steed was a sturdy and trustworthy Raleigh Scorpio with 10 gears. Fast-forward 43 years. In the intervening time void, as my family comes from Strathspey, I’ve cycled many times around the much-improved tracks in the Rothiemurchus and Glenmore areas. But I never relived this particular route

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