Thursday, November 29, 2018

Thursday Night Hunts the Vernon Witch Tors, with a Skooling for the boy.

I'd, inclusively, asked O if he wanted to come riding while he was mowing the lawn.  Initially he'd said no but then said, "actually yeah, okay".

So we drove to Nelson's through painful traffic getting us started quite late (6.20pm).  We rode up from there.  Steep bastard Parklands, then steep section Huntsbury, O struggling away like a trooper in his not very low low gear.  Up the gravel, and a right-hander across the fenceline, then up the singletrack.  Next, up the old landing strip, sheepshit everywhere, then up the grovelly gravel to the top.  O was stuffed, and didn't want to continue, and he was happy to wait for us, out of the wind and in the sun, so Nelson and me headed off down Vernon, pulling over for quite a few climbers, before bombing the descent to Rapaki Top.  Through here and into the Witch, climby climb, both stalling in the same place, tho he kept rolling while I foot-downed outright stopped.  Oh well.  The rest of the climb was good, and then we hit the descent, seats up for some reason.

To save time, we took to the road, heading for Castle.  Met the boys on our climb below the Tors; Robin, Wayne and Wazza, and couldn't convince them to turn back uphill to ride the Tors with us.  Castlerock was too wet, so we climbed up and headed down a very overgrown Tors track.  Hard to find the way.  Fun descent, with a couple of dabs in the usual spots.

Harder still was the singletrack above the road back towards Witch Hill.  SO overgrown was very slow and therefore more technical than usual.  Back into the Witch, me slowing on the climb, but racing the descent, and then off up the road around Vernon, legs tiring, back to find O, roughly 40 mins after we'd left him.

About 8 pm now we headed across the Traverse, and straight into the jumpy fun descent.  O doing well to keep up with us mostly, me hard on Nelson's tail.  Down the 'landing strip' attempting to avoid the crap, and then struggling to find and see the trail off to the left.  Well overgrown, bloody tricky, but we got to the stile alright.  Over this, and down, all the fun sections more difficult on account of not seeing the trail, and thistles smacking needles into our knuckles all the way.  Owie.  Dropping over the rocky sections, all good and fun, then in the off camber corners below, thistles of last time all cleared off, nice - what a relief.

Into the Old Skool, all breathing a sigh of relief at the lack of thistle action.  Good fang down this, O keeping up pretty good.  We'd gapped him a bit, so after the dip (after the back and forth pumpy section) we stopped and watched him proceed to jump, then crash into a rock and over the bars to disappear down behind/into a gorse bush!  Yelled out, "you okay?" "Yep." "Injured?" "Nope." I went back to him and his knees were a bit garked and the blood proceeded to trickle down his shins for the rest of the ride.  His hoodie was all full of gorse needles too.  Brushed him off, joked a bit about it and off we rode.  Good blat for the rest of it, then down the road and back around to Nelson's where he cleaned up under a tap a bit before heading home, 8.40ish.  LATE!

18.8 kms for Nelson and me, with 705 m climbed.

No comments: