Moonight snow....

Having missed tuesday's night ride with the club, I was very keen when Amber text me about riding wed night. Rich, Amber and I met Derek at Fromme about 7.30pm and headed up into the darkness with our lights off. As you can imagine, a rain forest, in november with no lights is pretty dark. Fortunately there is a gravel road all the way up and the moon was out so after a few minutes of mystery riding we began to get used to the light - or more accurately dark!

Obviously, the pictures here are not mine. My phone refused point-blank to take any pictures in the darkness.

Although the moon was bright it didnt really help us in the trees but every time we came into a clearing it was like riding into sunshine. The moonlight shadows were as crisp as a summers day and the moon became hard to look at. Its quite amazing really what the human eye is capable of - given the opportunity!

From about half way up we were riding up frozen snow - it sounded like we were riding through a bowl of corn flakes but it was helping us to see where we were going. It was a slow assent, (maybe 75 minutes) but the moonlight alone was worth it. Seventh Secret had frozen snow on it but was still crunchy so the tires would still bite ok. The log ride was a bit scary. Picture a 100ft long log sloping gently down, a couple feet wide at the start, narrowing to a few inches at the end - now cover it with water, freeze, sprinkle with snow, ride a bike down it then refreeze to solidify the track. Raise the whole thing 6 to 8ft in the air and now try to ride it. No-one fell off but it was pretty sketchy if you ask me!


We finished up with Leopard, Crinkum Crankum and Griffin. We hardly stopped but it seemed to go on for ever!

This is one ride I'll remember for a long time. The magical moonlight assent and the icy wet decent were both very memorable.

Thanks for a great ride guys.