Mountain Biking
A short history

  Mountain biking is something we started to do by accident really. Dave had always done some off road riding, as the Rough Stuff Fellowship will point out there's nothing new about going off road. However, when Karen needed a new bike, a mountain bike seemed the most practical thing to buy, because of the very low gears, ease of buying spares and all of that mundane stuff. Dave's road bike, a 20 plus year old Carlton Continental, bought to grow into at the age of 14, finally bit the dust in the mid 1990's. A good job really, it always was far too big! The Carlton was also replaced by mountain bike and those two bikes kept us happy for nearly 5 years before we both upgraded courtesy of Specialized, Karen to front a suspension 'Rockhopper A1 Comp' and Dave to full suspension 'Rockhopper A1 Comp FSR'.

  It was 1995 and Karen's girly pink Falcon road bike had given way to an Emmelle mountain bike, whilst Dave was still riding his old Carlton. By this point in time, the Carlton had been brush painted black and it had acquired a large set of panniers which had very little space inside, a sort of TARDIS in reverse. It was an interesting bike to ride, dangerous off-road because of it's massive 25" frame and narrow road wheels. It was used for off-road tracks in the 1980's when Dave did a lot of Youth Hostelling, by 1995 it was more suited to old railway lines such as the Camel Estuary Track, seen here just outside Padstow in Cornwall. In contrast, Karen's Emmelle was much easier, and safer, to ride. Consequently, Karen fell off less often than Dave ...

  By 1996, Dave had also bought a Mountain Bike, a Townsend. The panniers had disappeared and the lighter weight, lower seat height and fat tyres made for a more enjoyable ride. The bikes are seen here near High Street / Ullswater during a long sunny day out, above Pooley Bridge in the Lake District in Cumbria.

  Later in 1996, we packed most of the camping gear that we really needed onto the mountain bikes and headed off to the campsite at Beadlam near Helmsley in North Yorkshire. It's only a 90 mile round trip, but the furthest we'd been on these bikes was about 30 miles, rather less than the 100 plus miles per day of Dave's youth! However, we made it but decided we needed something better than the mountain bikes for touring with camping gear, a discoverey which probably led to us eventually buying the tandem.

  A few days after collecting the new Specialized bikes in early 2000, Dave rang up about a trailquest event advertised in Mountain Bike Rider magazine and entered us both. Trailquest, or the similar MBO, is based on navigating from one checkpoint to another, trying to find a specified number of checkpoints in a fixed time limit, points lost for being late. It was a bit of a shock to the system, learning to ride the new bikes whilst competing, but is was a hot sunny day and a great ride. Also the people were great fun and very helpful. Since then, Dave has competed in the EBOR / NYMBO league every year since then, either with local mate Dave B or on his own, Karen prefering to keep her mountain biking on a fun basis rather than a competetive one. To see how well Dave's been doing, click here to view the MBO/Trailquest page

  A month after that first trailquest, we once again headed for the North York Moors. It wasn't snowing when we set off, but there was still a lot left on the Moors, as you can see from this picture on Fylingdales Moor. We had a good ride round the forests, got very cold on the open moorland and nearly froze coming back down the hill at the end. How surprised would you be to find out we went to the pub to get warm again afterwards?

  We spent Easter 2000 in a static caravan on a small holiday park near Dorchester in Dorset, a good base for some great off road riding although a bit wet because it had been raining for the last few weeks. Half way through a long day out we stopped for lunch outside Frome St. Quentin, completely covered in mud from the tracks and pretty soon the sandwiches were mud covered as well. Mmm.... mud, tasty.

  The last day of the Easter 2000 holiday was spent hacking up and down the tracks in Puddletown Forest on the other side of Dorchester. The weather was great, hot and sunny enough to have dried most of the tracks, although not all of them! The forest is a great fun place too ride, mostly not too challenging but exciting in places and hard work on some of the hilly bits.

  December 2000, time to go to Lanzarote for a quick break before Christmas. It was great to go biking when the weather was so good, and the tracks were great fun. We stayed in Costa Teguise, small but with loads of facilities including friendly bike hire from Tommy's Bikes. We hired 2 Centurion Foxx's, never heard of the name but they worked pretty well.

  Just to prove we both made it up the hill on Lanzarote, here we are. Many of the tracks were used as roads by the locals, and they felt like riding up hill across corrugated iron. The hire bikes were OK, but after a couple of days we were wishing we had our own bikes with us.

  Hamer Moor in the North York Moors, March 2003 and we're still riding the same bikes, albeit they've had a few modifications and upgrades along the way. It might be time for a new bike soon, the 2004 Specialized Epic looks pretty good, or perhaps a Whyte PRST 4 ...

Pictures and text are copyright © Dave & Karen Petty- All Rights Reserved, please don't copy anything without our permission. Thanks, D & K.