Whiteway's New/Old Singletrack

Saturday 6th October saw a couple of us make an impromptu return to Whiteway's. Despite not having any sort of gameplan we ended up having a great day exploring a couple of little used areas and riding some trails that we first built about 3 years ago but that are now in danger of being lost to the undergrowth. My buddy had made the sensible choice in wearing trousers I was in shorts and my legs were mottled red with the nettle stings. After the first couple of hundered stings you would think that any additional ones wouldn't be felt - not so.

A couple of the trails are in the woodland in the area of the iron age hill fort where we met and upset a gaggle of ramblers, it takes more than a few winges to spoil our day and there were whoops of laughter as we dropped into the hidden glade followed by a push uphill to the start of one section of singletrack that has a couple of technical challenges thrown in. Those who have ridden with us on the Muddy@rse rides will know the sort of thing - off camber, rooty, and a couple of fallen trees to negotiate - basically technical rather than fast and flowing. The final challenge is a hole left by the rootball of a fallen tree, no real problem however this one has a 6 inch diameter root across the bottom of the hole - lovely! Then it was across to the masts at Bignor Hill for a short but very sweet singletrack section that runs slightly downhill south of the Monarchs way. More fun here with tricky log piles and tree stumps to ride over, so good I did it a couple of times while my buddy made phone calls and finished off an energy bar.

Now it was time to rediscover a playground to the north of the main fireroad drag. Yet more nettles to get through - by now my legs were mottled and the pain as the hem of my shorts touched the skin was almost unbearable. Undeterred we built a couple of log jumps and cleared the route of fallen tree debris - we were particularly proud of the 'out' as we managed to redirect the trail 15 yards east to include a short but very steep drop - total @rse on the backwheel moment.

We headed back to the carpark by re-riding all the trails we had taken on the outward journey, in this direction they were even better as after a couple of short climbs gravity was on our side for the majority of the singletrack.

A couple more run throughs and we should have a route that is 100% natural and a mix of technical singletrack with gentle fireroad climbs. But best of all it is all ours - it was obvious no-one had taken advantage of our previous work 3 years ago.