What did people think of it?
What was the skiddaw round ride like on Sunday?
Any pics?
Aaron
BMW
I have got some pics that I will put on the Gallery later but here’s one of Rick taking a rest from the muni.
Simon
i really enjoyed it, having ridden gaburn pass before i knew what to expect, and rode a much greater percentage than i did last time. That made it a good ride for me, and it wasnt that long a walk either, compared to some other rides…
The Sunday ride, Honister to grange i also enjoyed. There was very little walking on the way to grange which was good, and of course there was that amazingly technical rocky stepped kinda section, very challenging and enjoyable for me.
Slight downside at the amount of trailside maintenance required eh aaron 
The ride back from grange to honister was also good, as it was still a ride, and not just a long walk back, apart from the big technical downhill at teh end, a lot of the rest of the trail was rideable, although it would of been much more fun without that dreaded rain that doesnt happen in cumbria…
The trials at wilfs cafe on saturday afternoon was also good fun, not least because i got to ride the pimpmobile (before mechanical failures…)
Thanks to Simon and aaron for organising the event
Mark
lol, yeah sorry about that everyone, can’t blame me I’d hardly done anything on it! And the most anoying thing is it’s completely back to normal now so what was it!? will it happen again is what I wonder, glad to hear you enjoyed it, yes you rode all of all rides, I was very impressed Mark! Because anyone who wasn’t there belive me they weren’t easy routes…
And yes we did have a good paddle didn’t we? 
Aaron
Aaron,
The downhill from the car park was great, additional entertainment was provided by Steve who decided to take a shortcut just before the hairpin (steep downhill) - rocketed across the path - applied brake - turned into Superman - gravity then took over and he landed further down the hill in the undergrowth. Pretty spectacular and no video camera handy…
The railway track was a relaxing uphill with the slow group stopping to explain what BMW / Muni is to the walkers, who were shocked when we stated our route.
This was followed by a steep uphill road, where we walked. Soon after the bridleway started so did the riding. Fantastic views and riding, especially when it is downhill! We could see across the valley to the return route.
When we reached the path to Skidaw House we found out from bikers we were now ahead of the fast group (who rode to the house) so we started the long descent again fantastic riding, although I walked when the drop became too steep, the thought of retrieving myself (or a Muni) from the valley did not appeal.
Sarah & (Luni’s) Paul actually caught up with the bikers by the end (remember this was downhill!), the ride ended in a race with Chris the last finisher in the slow group beating Joe, the first rider in the fast group by approx 5 seconds. A great ending to an enjoyable weekend.
Hope to see the published photos soon.
Keith
I also really enjoyed the weekend. Garburn pass was a good, challenging ride, and apart from the extreeemely technical bits I also managed to ride most of it.
The Sunday ride to Grange is probably my favourite of all the MUni routes I have ever done. It had a bit of everything and was a really great ride.
The trials at the tea shop was good too (thanks for putting that picture up Simon).
The weekend was a great success, and I will look forward to future BMWs, especially if they are in Cumbria.
Just got home from BMW, only 30 hours after leaving Cumbria!
Twas good to see every one there.
The weekend started for me with an evening in the pub with joe, John, Mat, Phil and Paul and a little night muni on the way back to the bunk house. Joe lost some of his ability to ride after 3 pints and upded while still on the tarmac:-)
I enjoyed both the big rides I did, the Kentmere circuit ( about 12 miles) on Saturday with its great switch back section and fast desent to kentmere hall ( which i gather was watched by some of the Garburn Pass group) was fab. I rode it fast and throughly enjoyed it even though I broke a pair of spokes some where on teh switchback section.
Didn’t ride on sat afternoon as I was busy buying some new spokes and scoffing toff at Wilfs. Then followed a wheel re-bilud and trueing session back at the bunkhouse, thank you Keg and joe for the help and advice. Oh , and the Pasta.
On Sunday I was in the Blencathra loop slow group. We did a 12 mile ( or so) loop which keg has descirbed above. A GREAT route, the climbing is done mostly on easier surfaces like the rail path and the desents are fun. I really enjoyed the single track through Lonsdale crag and didn’t find it as exposed as I’d expected from the descriptions. I kept expecting it to get worse and then it was over and i was bombing down a really wide track back to the cars. I definatly had a riding head on at that point, I wanted to catch up with the MTBers…
Paul R and I thought about waiting for the others to catch up, but decided we’d go and put the ketttle on, so we could welcome the others back to the cars with cups of tea.
A good weekend of Xc riding.
Where are we going NEXT year?
Sarah
Re: Bmw
On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 13:40:33 -0500, “keg” wrote:
>the ride ended in a race with Chris the
>last finisher in the slow group beating Joe, the first rider in the fast
>group by approx 5 seconds.
Huh?
Klaas Bil - Newsgroup Addict
“The more you think, the less you have to do. - Leo Vandewoestijne”
Re: Re: Bmw
The fast group did a short extension which meant riding ~1.5km up another hill before returning back down the same path. This allowed the slow group to get in front as we had decided not to ride this part.
Saturday we had a good ride round to Kentmere and back over Garburn Pass, avoiding the difficult looking trials/downhill bit of Garburn pass and getting to ride the cross country style side. It was good if a little short, so Matt H, Steve C and I headed out for another ride from the campsite and found some really cool downhill switchbacks to ride which were super-fun.
I did think the Garburn Pass ride was a dumb one to take a mixed group on though, there were only a few people not having trouble on the easy side that I rode down, taking beginners down the hard side was dumb, when one of the organisers can hardly ride any of a ride, let alone the difficult downhill, that’s maybe a point to think it might be too hard a ride for a mixed ability group. It was also way way short, I couldn’t believe that people were all heading for cake and tea rather than doing the other half of a days ride. I guess there not being any organised place to stop for lunch on the ride meant everyone was a bit empty?
Sunday was good, I rode all the uphill until the gate before the junction for skiddaw house, it was nice that almost all the uphill was rideable and made me feel smug. There was a weeny bit there that wasn’t rideable by me after having already ridden a few miles uphill, I reckon all the uphill on that ride is potentially rideable. The exposed bit was fun although the point I fell off the unicycle and dropped it in the direction of the edge was a bit hairy. We all got back to the car park and then headed into Keswick for some food. I did this by unicycle as there was a bridleway heading there. That last bit of riding was certainly the fastest I’ve ever been on a muni, it was pretty easy stuff, steep and a bit loose, but wide. At one point I hit a waterbar riding flat out and did a massive jump off it and landed it still riding as fast as possible. I was pretty close to beating a guy on a bike down it until I pushed it too far and crashed off right near the bottom. Still beat all the cars into Keswick though.
I’m slightly confused as to the description of the rides previously as there not being much cross country riding in the Lakes, what with it being famous for it’s cross country mountain biking and pretty much everything we rode except the difficult way down into Kentmere being well and truly cross country riding?
Joe
Joe’s comments
I note what you say Joe.
Simon
A fantastic weekend, starting with a ride to the pub and then back in the dark, great fun even though I did fall off and hurt myself. The Saturday ride although much of it unridable did force me to try things that I would have never had the courage to attempt and surprised myself by managing to stay on, on some of the rocky drops. The Sunday ride was great, a fantastic circular cross-country to Skiddaw House and back with some great mountain side tracks. We would have set off earlier but some herbert decided to take the extended Penrith route to get to the ride. Oh well, thanks for waiting for me bye the way. Thanks to Simon and pluto for organising the weekend and look forward to next years Muni weekend(s).
Matt
After the best part of 1000 miles there and back, here I am again…
‘Twas a good weekend. It would have been better had I not taken myself out of commission on the first blummin’ ride with a brief venture into a particularly rocky stream; I now have one knee larger than the other which doesn’t want to bend. Ho-hum. Note To Self: work out how to wear 661s without them trying to saw through my legs after more than a mile or two.
Still, even after only doing 12.5 miles as opposed to 35 in South Wales it was good to see lots of people again.
The photos I took - mainly from the longer ride over the Garburn Pass - are (temporarily) here.
Phil
A good weekend
First of all, a big thanks to Simon & Aaron for organising the second of this year’s BMW.
As usual I really enjoyed myself. These meets are always great social events and this one was no different. I think there were about 25 of us which is a good turn out for a BMW. Apart from the riding, the hi-light for me was sitting ouside the pub (with the electric heaters on) 'till midnight supping beer and catching up with everyone.
The route back down to the carpark from Garburn Pass was a really good ride, but the route the other side of the pass to Kentmere should be definitely avoided by all but the experienced rider. There certaily was a lot of people walking that day, which was a shame.
The extra ride that Joe, Matt & myself did later that day was good fun, although the strong winds were a pain. By the time we got up high the weather had improved and we were rewarded with clear skies and fantastic views.
The Blencathra XC loop on Sunday was also a very good ride and was certainly hard going at times. Possibly to much XC and not enough DH for me. I enjoyed it all the same.
I will do my best to get round to putting my photos on the gallery ASAP.
Steve
I don’t, I’m sorry lol, but we gave acurate descriptions of the routes and when we were talking about route choices near the bunk house I said (quote)…
“this is very hard and claife heights is easy-intermediate.”
To be honest, no one has the right to complain about that because everyone said they’d do Garburn. It was totally their choice.
Personally I find 9 miles of hard, technical riding enough. (remember we did the other side down, more tiring than smooth singletrack, even though you did 3 miles more.
Glad to hear you seemed to enjoy it. And everyone else 
Aaron
PS: there arn’t that many XC routes, we did 2 of them, and I would say theres not that many MUCH better.
By the way, the next BMW we host will be very different. So for those who didn’t enjoy this one, dont be put off.
Sounds like the vast majority enjoyed it!
I really wish I was able to come, as planned for the Sunday, but getting up at 5am on saturday, going to London, then home at 11pm proved fairly tiring.
Hopefully we can ride some time soon, Simon and Aaron.
I’ll take a look through the pics…
Joe,
I would chalenge your labeling of the kentmere circuit as smooth single track, it wasn’t a rock garden but it wasn’t smooth either, however falls were less serious as the landings were not so sharp. Personally I find that I don’t want to fall on steep rocky outcrops miles from a road… therefore I walk those sections. Had i done the Garburn Pass I think I would have been bored, too much walking, not enough riding. I chose to go and do a route with more riding.
As for The XC thing… do we have to go there again. There is bags of XC in cumbria, I’ve riden some it. I crossed the lakes over four days a few years back and that was mostly XC with small amounts of road or cycle track where they fitted our route. I think there may be a lack of “short circular” XC routes however as most of the best bridleways are over moutains beween two valleys so to make a circuit you have to go around a big hill. For a mixed ability group like a BMW a short route is usefull, left to our selfs, some riders will enjoy 25 miles circuits, but others are knackered at the 5 mile mark. Partly this is because riding is less tiring than walking and pushing , and the less experienced riders will be doing more walking. It was a mistake we made on the first BMW, when the short route was 7 miles and the long 10.
It is something for organisers of big group muni events to bear in mind. Along with the fact that small groups move a lot faster than large ones
and some times some subtle group engineering is usefull.
Sarah
Opinion, Advice and Next Year
Sarah,
most of what you say is very true and I know you have ridden across the Lakes a few years back.
You obviously chose the right route for yourself - I don’t blame you for not liking bouldery technical riding like Garburn Pass.
When you live in an area lacking in bridleways you might even come to the conclusion there is bags of XC in the Lakes.
However, in my opinion, having spent the past 30 years walking them, the past two years riding them, listing and writing about ALL of them for the Club guidebook I have found:
-
the ‘quality’ xc routes form a small percentage compared to the routes going DH from a pass, hill or mountain,
-
what there is, is generally more suited to MTB, which is why it is so popular to MTB’s and
-
In order to produce a long route of 20+ miles of quality riding you have to, without exception, include road of some kind.
Even without cataloguing all of the bridleways in Cumbria, if you look in the MTB guidebooks at the XC routes you will see this is the case. For example, see the Coniston route in this months MBUK which is nominated as an MBUK Trail of the Year, see
http://www.mbuk.com/trails.asp?id=45
Your advice concerning the size of groups etc is both true and very useful and we shall certainly bear this in mind in the future.
Thank you all very much for coming I am glad the majority of the people attending enjoyed it. It was nice to catch up with so many I haven’t seen for a long time. In the future I think we should make attending the pub on the Saturday evening a scheduled social event!
As Aaron said, if we do organise anything for next year, one way or another it will be very different, so I do hope you will all come to that as well.
CMW (UK) = early July 2005? 
Regards
Simon
I think there was a bit of pressure going on not to have to run a claife heights ride that day though. The thing to remember is that as possibly one of the best technical riders in the UK, your idea of very hard is much much harder than many riders, especially less experienced ones. I kind of had some idea of what it was going to be like, hence I headed round to miss out the really hard bit, but I suspect some people would have classed that side well into impossible, rather than very hard.
As for the what is XC / what is downhill thing, that’s one that could run and run and run. I think there is a big difference between more technical DH riders and faster XC riders, which is possibly why some faster riders think there is more XC riding in the lakes, as once you get quite fast, you’re riding much closer to bike speeds, so bike XC stuff is fun, whereas if you’re riding it with long cranks on a small wheel, it just isn’t. There’s also some difficultly in categorising what is DH and what is XC, I’d have put one side of garburn pass down as DH and the easy side as XC riding, simply because one side was something I’d not be surprised to see ridden on a rigid hardtail bike and the other side totally was.
Anyway, that was just a few comments, it was a wicked weekend, well worth the travelling, good riding, good campsite, nice people etc. To those who weren’t there, you missed some good riding.
Joe
I must thank to Simon and Aaron for organising the weekend. I did enjoy the weekend even though I was exhausted by the time I got home late Sunday night.
For me Saturdays ride was half good. The eastbound DH required lots of hopping something I don’t do partly so I don’t break my Muni and partly because I’m crap at hopping so I ended up walking most of it. The westbound DH was good though and I really did enjoy that part. I never enjoy any UH (uphill) so no comment on doing that (where’s the cable car when you need one)
Sundays ride was the better of the two I did, with the exception of the necessary UH of course. I particularly liked being chased by a flock of sheep down the difficult DH section forcing me to ride virtually non-stop except for the odd UPD when I had to mount quickly else I’d would have had to wait for the sheep to pass. The bad part of Sundays ride was getting soaked in the rain at the end but I blame that on Aaron for bending his frame so we had to wait for him
As for what is DH, XC or any other acronyms you care to mention it ends up being a personal evaluation. What you may say is flat I may say is uphill but I get fatigued quickly unlike some who just seem to go and go and go :envy: I’m now trying out 125 cranks instead of 150’s on my Muni so I can go faster and my (short) legs don’t have to bend so much, so far they feel great, the cranks that is my legs are a different matter.
Cheers, Gary