Stonor, Chiltern Hills

diddyfunk

Hi Guys

I have just seen this route in the latest edition of MBUK.

has any1 ridden it? Will it be quite muddy now?

I cant find the route either as they advise it is available on here - any help would be good.

Can you leave your car in the lay-by they talk about while you are out on your bike?

Thanks

milko9000

I'm off to give it a shot on Saturday morning, I'll let you know if nobody else has before then!

diddyfunk

Snap - im off on sat morning as well - may well see you out there.

You using a GPS or going via map?

milko9000

Ha, cool. I'll be on a turquoise SB-66 which I have discovered stands out a little bit, do say hello if you spot me. We've got a GPS and laminated the map. Going on past experience of this kind of thing we'll still get plenty lost plenty often.

(edit - I should be more social. If you want to actually just join with us for the whole ride I'm sure you're welcome to. Haven't really set a start time but I figure it'll be 10am or so)

diddyfunk

Thanks but I need to start about 9ish as need to leave time to get lost and then travel back across london.
Ill be in red with a white lid if u see me.

We'll have to exchange notes when we are back
Thanks

milko9000

How did you get on? Without a GPS I think we would've got very lost, we still did a couple of little diversions and took it to 28 miles. Pretty good fun though, nice and hard work getting up but rewarding coming down. I managed to bury myself and bike in a hedge on that first descent, it was so fast and so greasy!

diddyfunk

It was good, I assume it was you I stopped and talked to?

I got VERY lost on point 7 where it was talking about following the white arrows down then uphill - it never went uphill and then I spent 20mins trying to figure out where I had gone wrong and then just called it a day and went straight to the car in stonor.
Really nice ride though, would have liked to have finished the whole route!

Was it the Garmin 800 GPS that you had - how do you find it? - I'm guessing it not really possible getting lost with it?

milko9000

Aha! I wondered if it was you but figured you'd planned to get out a lot earlier than we started!

Yeah, shortly after the second time we saw you we managed to get a puncture each in quick succession but since you didn't catch us up assumed you must've gone wrong. The top of the hill immediately after where you'd stopped was very confusing, think you're meant to hang a sharp left. We went off piste discovering this, hence the punctures probably.

Anyway, you missed a descent or two but nothing major really. Worth another crack some time!

My mate's got the Garmin 605 I think - not a touchscreen one anyway. It's a little bit tricky sometimes trying to work out exactly which bit of forest to aim down but you can usually figure it out with one or two false starts to narrow things down. Lets you set destinations and routes either by road (not really singletrack though) or as the crow flies, and follows waypoints nicely enough. Sometimes it has a weird habit of spinning the display round as you come to a stop, which can be frustrating, have to start rolling just to get an idea which way up the map should be! It didn't do that yesterday so I'm not sure why.

diddyfunk

I was washing my bike this morning and as I was washing the rear wheel there was a loud Shhhhhh and tyre went straight down - There was a massive thorn in the tyre - lucky I managed to get back to the car!
I'm just annoyed that I couldnt finish the route but i still had a great time.

I ended up leaving about 09:45 from the car and 2 'detours' put me back about an hour!

All in all a good ride.

Glad you had a good one

spikeyjack

I have just read the article in what mountain bike as well and was wondering how the trails were? worth waiting a few weeks to dry out or are they ok now? reading your previous posts, its seems like its easy to go off route. any tips to avoid this?

diddyfunk

when I did the route before it was quite muddy and it had not rained for quite a while so I would definitely give it a while before trying it now.

The route has some propper single track (not much) and is mostly on disused roads, fire roads and small amount of road to link it all up.

There is a lot of climbing so be prepared for some hard work. I did this on my Stumpjumper with propedal on and didnt find it a problem but a hardtail may be a good idea (what I will be using next time).

I am a quite good map reader and got lost on more than one occasion with the instructions provided so I will definitely be using a Garmin next time.

All in all a gorgeous ride through lovely English Countryside encountering all types of wildlife. Be warned that you may ride for a couple of hours and not come across anyone else at times and mobile reception is not good because of the hills so take care.

Hope that has helped - have fun.

milko9000

We've not been back more than once, the lack of singletrack makes it more of a training ride/tour (due to the climbs and pleasant countryside) rather than the faster stuff we're currently more interested in. There are a few fast descents in there but fairly sparse compared to the tooling along wide tracks. I'm sure there's plenty more around there too, one of the other mags had a different ride through the area and we saw plenty of MTBs while we were on the way in, heading in different directions.