As a winter blues buster, 18 club members travelled to Staffordshire to ride the trails at Cannock Chase. After an early start, bikes were being offloaded from the cars in Cannock by 10:15 on a perfect crisp & sunny morning.
4 Monkeys and an old Dog?We decided to hit the full lenth Monkey Trail first off, it consists of 14 miles of single track with just shy of 600 metres vertical climb. The trail has some real technical sections including North Shore ladders, drops and steep rock gardens. It was fantastic to see how well all our members were able to tackle these sections. What is more, as the saying goes, "What goes up, must come down" and true to this there are some fantastic decents including the North Cliff (my fave) and the final Tackaroo back to the centre. It was a weary & hungry bunch of riders that stopped for a late lunch back at the centre. After lunch, some riders decided to start heading back whilst a few of our more persuasive members manged to get an extra lap of the Follow the Dog trail which they duly rode in 1 hour, not at all bad considering what had been ridden already.
It was a long day but thoroughly worthwhile with big smiles on everyones muddy faces as evidence.
We will return later this year.
