[SUBW-A] Trip Report: mountain biking, sat 25th

[Richard Wood]

Trip report for Mountain biking, Sat 25th.

People: Alex and me

after convincing Alex to do the Blackheath to Mittagong in a day, we found 
ourselves at Springwood on Friday night, eating massive bowls of spaghetti, 
and trying to catch a few hours sleep before heading off...that was until 
we got up at 1am, and ate our big bowl of weet-bix, then found that a 
decent amount of rain was still coming down and not looking like easing off 
(you can see so much at 1am...) - but we were still determined to go...well 
kind of...we thought it might be a bit dodgy in the wet...then we thought 
it might be a lot dodgy, and cold...so after deliberating long enough to 
miss the train, we reconsidered our options and went back to bed...
Thus we slept in till 5am, at which time we got up, struggling to move due 
to being overly carbo-loaded, and headed to Katoomba, planning on 
connecting up some trails to Glenbrook. It was freezing cold, and dark - 
actually we were struggling to see the lines on the road, the cold also 
pointed out the disadvantages of leg warmers as opposed to full long pants 
in a particular part of the human body you generally don't want too 
cold...But we got to Narrow neck as light was starting to ascend, and the 
uphills soon warmed us up. Soon after, Alex's gear cable managed to snap, 
luckily he had a spare, so we started to freeze again as we tried to get it in.

At the end of Narrowneck, we continued down the ladders and the single 
track before joining up with the fire trail to Medlow Gap. After this, we 
had an awesome downhill down to a creek, although my memory fades me about 
where exactly we went...maybe due to some big gates across the track with 
signs that we figured must be offering us $10000 if we kept on going... 
Well we didn't find any stashes of $10000, or other people luckily, but 
somehow we managed to end up at the Kedumba River, below Kings Tableland, 
really not sure how we ended up there... During this time, my bike decided 
to transfer into a 3-speeder as the back gear lever decided not to work 
anymore...then at Kedumba, i also realised that all the mud had managed to 
wear out my back brake pad...and that i now had a nice groove in my rim...

Anyway, from there it was up the "nice", "short" climb on to Kings 
Tableland, by this time, the rain was coming down heavier again.
After lots of uphill we arrived at the top, but were getting cold again, 
and since the prospect of doing Andersons and the Oaks fire trails without 
back brakes and only 3 gears, and in the rain didn't appeal that much, we 
decided to pike out to Wentworth Falls, where we had lunch, and caught the 
train back to Springwood for nice hot showers...


in retrospect, probably lucky we didn't take on the mittagong trip, as it 
really was wet. and cold. and we didn't know how long we'd be out there. so 
we'll have to save it for another time, interested?

cheers,
richard