Saturday 13 May – Oxford Falls

Another beautiful (albeit a bit cold!) morning, and another great bike ride. We (Doug, Brian, Stephe – although this is a fairly ugly photo of all of us, Brian’s midriff is just a *little* more embarrassing than the rest!) were probably not quite as focussed on a long flowing ride given our deadline this morning, with more poking about at little bits of Oxford Falls that we’d only played with occasionally… although we did manage to do a bit of riding after all!

Before we started, we went off and checked out the playground at Lizard Rock (near the top parking area on Morgan Road) – there are some silly people in the world! You have to be looking down the big jump to really appreciate the fact that down hillers are not a smart group…(!)

After the initial detour, we went down the Aerodrome loop (Doug was absolutely hammering (beautiful corners, lots of slides and elegant jumps off the rocks on the way down), so much so that he left both Stephe and Brian well behind, and very scared!), then up Little Moab (a great climb), followed by Little Moab down, and then back up the main Aerodrome track. At the top of the Aerodrome track, we went off to the single ‘out and back’ tracks, and had a go at some rocks (small but challenging) along the way – we also met up with a couple of people at the top of the big dish shaped rock drop, who appeared to form the view that we were a bunch of tossers for playing there for a while (ah well).

After some general hammering around in the singles tracks, we had a great run back along the top of the Aerodrome track to the roadway (indeed, quite a good finish to a short local ride).

Doug was in hyper-democratic mode, which was a very impressive way for him to be, and Brian (tragically) has now officially “lost it”. We don’t expect to ever see him back on a bike again – ah well, he was a fine rider once.

Stephe’s fancy new forks did what forks are meant to do, and – all in all – another great day out on the bikes.

Photos, track etc, here, some highlights below (still no photos of Doug!!):