Wales is known for being wet and rainy but I’ve never know it like this before. It seems to have been raining pretty much non-stop for months. Everything is sodden, the ground is saturated, low-lying areas are flooded and rivers are at bursting point. The garden is a quagmire and where it isn’t it has become a pond – I haven’t been able to get to the compost bin since October thanks to the flood water. Roads are closed, we’ve barely seen the sun and the mountain bike trails have turned into rivers.<\/p>\n
We’re made of stern stuff here though so a little rain doesn’t deter us though. This morning Owain, Jeremy, Dave, Rhys and myself met up at the ClimachX car park at 9am for a post Christmas ride. A chance to blow away some cobwebs, burn off a few of the excess calories we had consumed over Christmas and get some fresh air. Owain hadn’t really ridden any proper MTB trails before so it was a bit of a baptism of fire for him but he seemed to enjoy it and will be back for more I’m sure.<\/p>\n
It was indeed very wet out there with deep puddles and standing water everywhere and some pretty fast flowing streams running along some of the trails. Once we were wet we were wet though (wow, lots of w’s and e’s there!), so we barely noticed that it had started to pour with rain. I hadn’t ridden the ClimachX trail for a while either and the final descent has been clear-felled in places which made it feel completely different – still a great descent though.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately my GoPro seems to have stopped working. I’ve managed to get some footage from it but it stopped responding halfway around and now won’t switch on or do anything. Here’s the footage I did get.<\/p>\n