Snow Falls...

Ah, the last day of freedom before returning to work. If work opens tomorrow that is, latest news is that the car park and pavements around the buildings may be too icy to allow access... we can but hope. All the snow is still here, although we've had no new falls up here for several days. The temperature is so low and the ground is so cold now that nothing is melting. Altnaharra, just to the north of us has recorded an incredible low temperature of -22.3C and the temperature here at night is generally between -7C and -10C. Still, it means more fun snow riding for us. I'm posting a wee video of my friend and I out on our local hill. It's not a video of us riding as such... more a video of us falling. We were wondering how soft the snow would be if we fell into it in a crash, so we decided to throw ourselves into a few drifts to find out. I'm planning on riding to the station tomorrow to get the train to Inverness, then riding out to where I work. Wish me luck...

Out in the Snow

Went up the local trails in deep snow. When I say deep I really mean it, check out the pictures, it was over my knees in places!

The fresh snow was supersoft and we found it really hard to get traction a lot of the time. The real difficulty was just getting going, once we were on the move we could keep it up until we hit a soft patch and then to rear wheel just dug in...

Coming down was the most fun as riding up was pretty hard. We felt like big bike freeriders having to push our bikes up slopes just to get the ride down. The great thing was that the falls didn't hurt, as we just crashed out into big drifts.

In the end we decided to see how far we could throw ourselves in the air and land without pain and spent a happy half our off our bikes just throwing ourselves into deep drifts for a while.

I have been using some of the new kit I got over the Christmas period and I'll post some mini reviews of the gear in the next wee while when I've given it enough time to work or break.

The snow up here gets deeper and deeper. I know the rest of the country seems to be catching up a little but we've had snow since the 19th December with no thaw. Each time it snows it just builds and builds. It's actually getting a bit boring now as it's making it hard to get out and really ride trails. We still give it a go though and we're getting more and more used to riding in snow now...