Saturday 27 May - Oxford Falls

With lots of chopping and changing in the week leading up to this ride, we (Brian, Joe, Matt and Stephe) were lucky to score an invite to join Gavin, Ryan and Greg on Saturday afternoon at Oxford Falls.

The rain that fell earlier in the day had long gone by the time we arrived at Morgan Road (around 2pm), and the day turned out as beautiful as all mountain bike riding days are!

We decided to try going down the singles track from the access road (where we normally come *up* and have a bite to eat), with a view to turning North at the half way down mark, going across the valley back up to the bottom of the moon rock track (which we have previously called Little Moab?). In any case, it may well be a very fun ride to do, but it's a bit silly doing it without warming up... there were many grunts of discomfort, the key one of which was the very solid earth shaking thump Brian made as he attempted to reshape his hip bones at one point.

We made it back onto the main track leading down to Deep Creek, but went the other way, back across the swamp at the back of the Aerodrome, and back up the Aerodrome track (also called the Cross Country track I believe). Greg had to bail at this point off to more important things, and the rest of us then dropped down the moon rock track, down to Deep Creek, across the other side and climbed *up* the northern drop into Deep Creek.

By this stage, we'd done most of the normal tracks backwards, and were at risk of 'getting over it' (as the photos will attest!).

But, with a quick farewell to Gavin and Ryan (who had to get back to their families), we managed a final drop back down the moon rock track, and then home.

All in all, a pleasant Saturday afternoon - but we could probably have organised it a little better so that there was more fun riding and less 'tooling about'! At least we've done a couple of the tracks backwards, which may help for future reference...

Photos here, and some samples below (no GPS or mapping, in the absence of Doug!):