Pipes bursting, roads back to black, water flowing, mercury above zero….but I should have known that there would still be some craziness out there.
I set off for with my Orange for a lap of Loch Garten returning via Slugan Pass and Glen More. This is normally a couple of hours easy pootle but today it took me 4+. All because of the water ice, ice baby! Wherever there had been a vehicle or lots of foot traffic, there was thick water ice.
Here’s the Slugan….note the mini Christmas tree on my bars, a souvenir of one of my early ice slides into a tree 🙂
And here’s the climb, which I managed to clean, slowly. All credit for that goes to my super Schwalbe Ice Spiker tyres. Full review to follow, but let’s just say for now that these tyres have transformed my winter riding. There was a time I would never have ridden this stuff, now I look for the most solid frozen bits and just tell myself that the studs will grip, and they do (most of the time). Magic!
Lower down the forest everything was melting so I had another 10km of sugar to plough through back to the crazy holiday ness of Aviemore. Fun!