Saturday 10 January 2009: Wet Bike

Just back from a not entirely successful trip to Glentress with 42.

The weather was a bit discouraging - grey, wet, cold and windy, but not bad enough to bail. And Rick's bike gave up the ghost just after we started, so he retired to the caff.

But the ICE was the main problem. They must have had some freak conditions down there the last few days, cause there is not a spot of ice around here, but all the forestry tracks there were covered edge to edge in literal sheets of ice. Ice that had been rained on, so you could barely stand on it, never mind bike on it. At one point as I was trying to walk uphill after giving up on biking, me and the bike went from standing still to slowly sliding down the hill, both feet and both tires slowly slipping backwards. I felt like a cartoon character.

The actual bike trails were better, but had patches of ice on every switchback that were almost, but not always, rideable, so it was a pretty careful ascent. When we got to the top car park with no improvement we cut the ride short and the descent was much better - swooping and whooping through the trees.

• NIKON D700:
• f/13.0:
• 1/40":
• 50mm:
• ISO 200

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