early on sunday morning i went a quick motorbike ride... i went a ride up an intended country road loop i used to do nearly every other week around 10 years ago when i lived at the seaside town of dunbar..from the sea town a winding road climbs up into the lammermuirs to crystal rig...a wild bleak windswept hill beside moneynut forest...a seldom visited corner of east lothian where i used to ride my motorbikes offroad on the hills and forest there without attracting any attention...the coming of the windfarm sparked an interest in the area for a while with visitors though nowadays it is again little visited...the pot holed gravel covered single track road going up to moneynut edge puts off the average motorist...
a trailbike though just eats up this surface...unless like what happened today when trying to ride uphill on 6" of iced snow on a rear trail tyre...
the initial climb from the coast at innerwick is quite steep...
and as you crest the hill of west steel the scenery of the huge wind turbines is a bit like something out an HG Wells novel...
as you ride into the forest the road condition gets worse....and so in some ways better!
this is still a maintained county road but hard to believe...
then i reached the snow line and my bike nearly spun to a halt...with hardly any rear grip from the bridgestone claw pattern trail tyre so i had to paddle with my feet and slowly get up hill but the trail was blocked with a fallen tree...
there were MX tyre tracks from recently and footprints from someone walking a bicycle and i thought how pugsley would have cruised up here...however 165KG of motorbike with a slick road trailtyre wasnt going through the 2ft drift over a small ditch off the road around the tree...
i got turned round and headed back down hill out the snow and returned the way i came...
stopping to clean an unbalanced front wheel with snow!
i still had fun even though i couldnt get through the snow..like cycling theres never a bad day out as long as your moving...
i filmed the ride up there with a tachyon helmet camera...
motorcycle ride....moneynut edge,lammermuir hills from coastkid71 on Vimeo.
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