Author: Cris Bloomfield

If you’ve ever been called “Outdoorzy,” Welcome Home – That’s the opening line from a new website that has been setup for people who prefer life in the big wide open spaces of the world. Outdoorzy.com is a one-stop-shop for any outdoor enthusiast and it’s community lets you search for people with similar interests near you. The site let’s you setup a profile and upload images a bit like Flickr, biut the key difference is being able to post trip reports, gear reviews, upcoming events and more.

I found out about the site after being contacted by Wade, the driving force behind the initiative. I think the appeal behind this is that it is not just a mountain biking site, but a truly cross-discipline website. So from a trails users perspective, there is a lot of scope for discussion about trail access and rights. I think it could be a real asset for proactive IMBA members. Wade said:

Hi, I’m dropping a line to “outdoor” bloggers far and near about our site, so I thought I’d give you a shout as well. I checked rothar.com out today and like the posts. Your post yesterday was especially relevant to me. I commute to work a few days a week and have been wondering what some people do about the clothing situation in particular.

Anyway, back to our site. Basically it’s a social networking site for outdoor enthusiasts. You can post/read; reviews, trip reports, gear lists, forum quetions/answers, etc. on a plethora of outdoor activities. Mostly people from the states and Canada so far, but we have a few members in the UK and elsewhere around the globe. We’re trying to build the community, and in these first 6 weeks the site has been live we’ve been gaining members quickly.

Thanks for taking a look, and thanks for the posting on commuting. I need to work on the details of my commute to get it down to a science.

Wade
Outdoorzy.com

I’m in. It looks good to me. Check it out. This is blatantly stolen from the Singletrack website, but it’s important to support the Mountain Rescue people. The Edale Mountain Resuce Team need some help.

Due to redevelopment at Lafarge Cement Works close to Hope, Derbyshire, Edale Mountain Rescue Team have relocated their existing base which was housed in a bay of the existing maintenance workshop into temporary accommodation elsewhere on the site, whilst the maintenance workshop is refurbished to provide office accommodation for Lafarge.

Lafarge have provided three bays of the same building which are being converted into a purpose built rescue and training centre for the team. This new facility should be operational by Easter 2006. Lafarge have been very generous with their support but the team still needs to find £150, 000 by December 2007 to pay for the construction work and fitting out.

The team attends a hundred incidents each year, helping climbers, walkers, mountain bikers and tourists in distress. Incidents occur on many well know areas, Kinder Scout, Losehill, Win Hill, the Derwent Moors, Stanage, Burbage and Froggatt to name a few of the more frequent locations. The team is a charitable organisation, funded entirely by public donation and consists of 50 volunteers who turn out at all times of the day and night to help those in trouble.

If you would like to contribute to the appeal please send donations to the Team Chairman Neil Roden at Edale Mountain Rescue Team, PO Box 6490, Bakewell, DE45 1XR.

Well recently it’s been a while since I managed to forget something in regards to riding into work. The curse of the daily bike commuter is forgetting some vital item that makes the day a work a complete disaster. Until wonders of modern urban design like Canada’s Velo City, become a reality, riding to work involves getting all hot and sweaty at best and getting soaked to the bone and cold at the worst. Commuting in work clothes, especially if that is office wear (shirt, tie, shoes, trousers) just isn’t an option.

As a result hardened riders will have a stash of goodies to make sure they’re not going to suffer the same fate twice. This may involve a bike lock which lives at bike racks. A towel and wash kit, with an emergency pair of pants and socks and a shirt and tie which live in a desk drawer and a pair of shoes in permanent residence under the desk. So after discussing it with some friends here’s a list of the worst things to forget when commuting:

Underwear. Not too bad I suppose as you can always go commando. It gets worse if you managed to break the fly on your trousers or split the seat of your pants on the same day.

Socks. This is particularly bad when you wear business attire.

Shirt. Sitting in stinky merino top all day is not good. Especially when you’re..um…’cuddly’ and the top is a tight fit.

Trousers. A serious omission as 3/4 bibs are not a good look for the office. As Al has described, it is “hard enough to deal with the fallout and ignomony of a pantless day without the ridicule of my smug pant wearing chums”.

Shoes. Clanking round the office in damp cycling shoes is not a good look. Veterans of the Art of the Commute will have strategically stowed a pair that live under the desk. How these can migrate and end up at home is the subject of much debate.

Security ID, swipecard or keys to Work. Worst if you have to open up or are first in. Unpleasant if you have to prove your identity to Security, but at least not so bad as having to go all the way home again.

Keys to Home. The frustration of knowing all day at work that you have locked yourself out. Significantly worse if a) no one else has a set of keys and b) your neighbours call the police thinking your breaking in.

Lights. Quite how you managed this sometimes surprises me. Frequently it’s that day after a night ride or the day after you had to go home before it became dark and so didn’t fit the lights in the morning. I’m not sure if it’s better to have an urban homewards journey where you have to dice with traffic or a rural one where you have to dice with unlit roads. At least in the former case, Scotchlite suddenly becomes the best thing ever. Must remember to eat more carrots.

Food and means to buy food on the same day. This in combination is quite horrible.Deoderant. It’s bad when there is no shower at work. A day without a chemical shower is unbearable.

Towel. Then doing the Mr Bean Limbo dance round the towel machine and hoping no one walks in on you

Family. Forgetting you’re picking your daughter up, then remembering when you’ve 20 mins to do a 40 min commute and having to redline it when you’re broken because you’ve already forgotten to bring any food/means of getting food that day. This can be can be quite bad.

State of Repair. For example, forgetting that your tyres don’t grip on wet leaf-goo slicked descents or that your tyres are shagged and cunningly also forgetting a spare tube and or pump.

You’re a Target. Remember you are virtually invisible to car drivers. Also remember that drivers forget you ever existed the instant their vehicle is alongside you.

Thanks to Jenn, Andy P, Piers, Marty, Alex, Bill, Gavin, Stu N, Simon and Alec.

Despite the fact that the trail has been open for a year, it was only today that Tyrrell and I managed to get around to riding on some new trails in Wales at Penmachno. Just up the road from Betws-y-Coed, it’s a gem of a trail. There is some good information about the route and a map on dilan4.com.

Speaking to some of the people at the car park after the ride it emerges that there are plans to turn the current modest (but great) trails into a much longer 40km route. If that happens it’d be great because the riding was superb. Mega-fast singletrack, lots of exposed rock sheets and armouring and switchbacks going up and down the mountain. I’m contemplating joining up the Marin and Penmachno trails, but I’m sure it’s already been done…

On Thursday night I went up to Calderdale and saw Chipps and everyone at Singletrack. It was good to catch up with people and find out how things are going at the mag. There was also a chance to talk through some ideas for next year. After that we headed up to Mark’s local patch near Burnley and did some riding, on what it turned out was part of the Mary Towneley Loop which I have ridden before and some other bits that were definitely local trails. It was a gorgeous starry night and well worth getting out for on the Singlespeed.

This weekend I was home in Norfolk. It was a brief stop to do some work around the house including firing up the woodburner to test it out and bed it in for winter. It looks like it is going to be a cold one. I also managed to catch up with Herr Thorne down in Suffolk before heading back up in the early hours. The broken leg from Egyptian Kiteboarding is almost healed.

Riding is definitely on the agenda for this weekend. I just need to work out the where and when.

This has been posted in various place across the Internet, but is worth highlighting. Extreme mountain bike rider Stefan Oberlander has successfully jumped off a 3000ft cliff on his Santa Cruz VP-Free, opening a parachute while sitting on the bike and landing and riding off again without putting a foot down. Pictures of the descent jump can be found at on his website

After a few recent rides I’ve been thinking about getting a helmet cam. the market is fairly broad and there is a lot of choice. I’ve been thinking that the best solution is an all in one solution with recorder and camera with battery pack in one unit. This looks like to be the best bet. I’m thinking it would be cool to get one in the New Year before we go out to South Africa…

There is no disguising the fact that one of the reasons I moved to Manchester was for the fact that there was excellent mountain biking all around the city. Some of it (especially that to the west) takes longer to get to than other bits, but in general within 45 minutes in every other direction by car or train you can be somewhere great to go riding.

My first adventures were along the Manchester to Sheffield train line. It’s a great service because it passes through so many places that you can get off and go riding, Marple, New Mills, Strines, Edale, Hope and the list goes on. For the first three years or so of being in Manchester nearly all my local riding was along this route. Buy a day return pick somewhere to get off, pick somewhere to get back on and plan a route in between.

After hammering the trail is quite relentlessly weekend on weekend for three years i’d decided that it was time to explore further afield and this weekend was the first time in a long time that I’ve revisited some of those old routes. I hooked up with Neil again from Ride the Alps and we split the day into two halves taking in some stuff I did know and a lot of stuff I didn’t. Local knowledge definitely helps find some great stuff. The end result was pretty much all day riding between 9am and 4.30pm when it became dark.

The weather was a bit grim and it was very blowy in the wind, especially on the tops near Lyme Park, but it was well worth getting out doors for.

Thanks to everyone who has sponsored the rothar.com racing efforts so far. I’m not sure how achievable our fundraising target is, but we’re going to stick at achieving it. Off over to Calderdale this week to catch up with people, get some great singlespeeding in and discuss some things with the boys from Singletrack.

Jamie and Mary at Ride the Alps have been busy and have just sent through the following. “We’ve had a great summer season of biking with highlights including breaking our own record for the amount of fantastic singletrack descent on Chamonix to Zermatt and some superb technical riding in Canada with grizzly bears!”

“Thanks to all of you who rode with us in 2006 for making it our best season yet. As the nights draw in and the leaves crunch beneath your tyres, it’s the ideal time to start planning your 2007 summer holidays. We’ve just launched our new website with all the details of our 2007 trips and we’ve added a new point-to-point route finishing at the Eiger to our repertoire of classic high alpine routes”. Jed and I even feature in the redesigned website!

I’ve also had an email from Jeff Browning at yourmtb.com. It’s a new website that seems to be a cross between Bikemagic and MTBR. So there’s a selection of features stories, photos, and videos that mountain bikers post to the site.