The Helmsley to Scarborough Report

Yorkshire Day Ride.

On Sunday 1st August , Dave ‘Pickering 3″ organized our 2nd annual Helmsley to Scarborough mountain bike ride. by accident it took place on Yorkshire Day, and never ones to miss giving a ride extra significance, we immediately decided that from now the ride would always take place on the nearest Sunday to Yorkshire Day. Non Yorkshire-born club members would be allowed but they would have to buy the ice creams!

We had just six riders for the momentous event, the Pickering Three, Dave, Stu, and Rich. from Scarborough we had myself, Too Tall Tom and Jax, who rather disappointingly was not sporting a tattoo as she had at mountain mayhem! A Yorkshire Rose next year eh Jackie?! We rode the same route as last year, riding over some wonderful singletrack , fields, up and down dale until we reached Rudland Rigg. This is an old drovers road over the moors, wonderful views, which took us to Bloworth Crossing, the dis-used railway line to Rosedale.

A quick blast on this and we arrived at The Lion Inn at Blakey. 22 miles and already one o’clock.

Jackie spent most of the lunch break muttering “that means another 50 miles to go”, so no problems with maths then! On the way to this point we had done our good deed for the day by rescuing not one but TWO sheep from barbed wire, clearly we are super heroes in the making, Superman wore cycle shorts after all! We had only one near disaster when Stu attacked a downhill, the only problem was he was on my back wheel and I was looking for the right hand turn we would take any minute. He managed to descend the hill on his front wheel, only gently nudging my back wheel, impressive stuff! From the Lion we soon ate into the miles. First came the Big Apple
(so called as we rode it twice on a 100 mile epic), then a short section on the road, another fast section of singletrack, a pause to remember losing my £100 sunglasses on the previous ride, then a couple of miles on a very quiet but I will admit ,slightly hilly road.

We then turned into Newton Dale Forest and a fast blast through here, some wonderful views and one very interesting drop, the reason no one was expecting it as it was on the road! We descended to Levisham and had a well earned cup of tea and slice of cake! At this point Rich’s back wheel which had been threatening to die all day gave up the will to live, so Rich settled down to more cake and
tea whilst waiting for a lift. He even seemed genuine in his disappointment on missing out on two very big climbs. The remaining 5 almost managed to hide our envy and slowly rode the hills from Levisham to the Hole of Horcum. Then as it was his tea time Dave headed home leaving just 4 of us to complete the ride, the rain clouds threatened but it stayed dry, we made it to the harbour bar, having picked up Too Tall Tom’s son on the last stretch. He is no fool and that meant he got an ice cream too, Jackie treated us all after confessing to spending part of her life as an Essex girl!

Hope to see more riders out next year, and the rumour is we will have fish and chips on the north side instead of just ice cream!

Comments are closed.