A few months ago about 10 km of singletrack (one-way designated) mountain bike trails were opened in Clayton Vale, beside the National Cycling Centre.
It’s just a short drive across town from Timperley, and today I got around to visiting the trails for the first time. It was another lovely spring day in Manchester.
The trails are enjoyable and easy (if taken at my gentle pace), with smooth surfaces apart from a few deliberately placed rocks on the red trails. A lot of the corners, like the one shown above, are made easy by banking, and the trails were generally dry.
Here’s the flier. If you look at that, it shows all 10 km of trails.
It took me a little more than an hour to cover most of them, within a two lap route. I just missed out the red section from point 47 to point 57, the short black section, and the light blue section south of the river. The total distance for my two laps was about 13 km, and the Garmin gadget tracked my route as shown below.
It’s pretty good exercise as there are a few brief steep sections. The red route would be a bit quicker with suspension, but the other trails are smooth enough to enjoy at speed on a lighter bike like my old Shogun Trailbreaker. In fact, they would be perfectly amenable to hybrid or even road bikes.
Altogether a very pleasurable little outing, though sadly I narrowly missed out on a stroll with JJ and Rick.
No comments:
Post a Comment