cheeky tuesday pitch hill

Yesterday saw the first of many cheeky tuesday ride of 2012.

Myself and Ali headed over to Pitch Hill to do a bit of trail exploring before the visit of Struan down for the 2nd cheeky tuesday ride of the year.

We decided to start from the other side of Pitch Hill to try and explore some different trails. Part of the reason for this was to try and scout new trails for when non-southeast dwellers come down. We have been riding pretty much the same route with a few variations for a good few years now so time something new was on the cards.

Going straight out of the carpark we immediately found 3 trails cutting across a steep hillside. One of which was full of switchbacks and a lot of fun to ride. Corners were pretty close together and took a lot of concentration to get down smoothly. Not sure we managed that fully but it was a laugh trying.

We also had a look at the other trails which were pretty sweet apart from the sizeable and slightly unexpected jumps that appeared part-way down the trail. An agreed sensible approach was taken citing wrong tyres, wrong grips and/or wrong suspension setting and we gave these a wide berth.

Leaving Pitch Hill we headed over to Winterfold and found trails that managed to be both wet and grippy. Really good trails to practice your cornering.The pair of us came pretty close to person tree interface but just about avoided any serious crashes.

In fact the only significant ones were when I was trying to get on the bike, the best of which involved me very slowly going over the bars and cutting the back of an ankle on the handlebars. Pretty sure this could never be repeated.

We then headed off to take a look (and not ride) the gap jump on the flytipper trail – again sensible heads on.

Unfortunately this is where the already poor navigation skills of the two of us disappeared and we managed to go the wrong way down a road and have endure a long bridleway slog back towards the car.

Despite this it was a cracking ride and really looking forward to exploring more trails in the area in a couple of weeks time. Hopefully if there are no big downpours in the meantime riding conditions will be pretty near spot on.