Mountain Biking In Wales | Outside Online

You Are Here:

Home >> Wales on Wheels

Today's Question
What should you do if you run into a cougar in the backcountry? answer

What is the number one backcountry skill people should learn? answer

Today's Question
What are the five best environmental movies of all time? answer

What are the greenest colleges? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Traveler 2004

Page:

Wales on Wheels
Witness a singletrack revolution on the fresh trails of a land in transition

By Thomas Laird


	Get down: a rolling descent of Cader Idris Mountain, Snowdonia National Park (photograph by Steve Thomas)

Darn Technegol. That's Welsh for "technical section," a fair description of the rock garden where I've just crashed. I've been brought low by Coed y Brenin, the mountain-biking mecca of Wales, a network of five twisting, burly trails curled into a forest in the southern reaches of Snowdonia. There's nothing like a solo fall on an unknown trail in a foreign country to make you recalibrate your sense of your own ballsiness. After a quick inventory—bruised chest, torn-up hip, smashed derailleur hanger (I inevitably fall on the expensive side of the bike)—I decide that a shorter trail I disdainfully passed a while back doesn't actually sound all that bad. I slink to the trailhead and find my hands full—it's devilishly designed stuff.

It's my second day of biking in Wales, during a supernaturally clear November. I've come to check out two things: the singletrack that the Welsh have lovingly hand-carved out of their forests, and Orange Mountain Bikes, a UK manufacturer known for swaggering downhill rigs and solid cross-country rides, like the lightweight, full-suspension Five. I've set up base camp in Betwys y Coed, a tiny town squeezed between the Conwy and Llugwy rivers, in Snowdonia National Park. Snowdonia—all craggy mountains and moody light—spreads across most of northwestern Wales, a bitty chunk of the British Isles smaller than Massachusetts and less than 150 miles in length. Diminutive as it is, and just two hours by train from London, Wales feels remote, a sensation intensified by the narrow, winding roads—it takes time to get anywhere in this place. The town of Betwys y Coed itself is an oddly appealing mixture of pink-and-green Victoriana and outdoor-equipment shops. Betwys has long been Snowdonia's hiking headquarters, and now on weekends it's also common to see riders pulling into town, bikes racked atop their microscopic cars. At The Courthouse, my guest house in Betwys, I breakfasted with a multigenerational family of casual walkers to one side and a tattooed young mountain biker, off from her job at a Worcestershire sauce factory, to the other.

Thursday, my first day out, I rented a workhorse Marin at Beics Betws, located in a shack behind the post office and next to the town church. Andrew Hughes, the genial madman who was handling rentals, ripped out his topos, eyes gleaming, and told me how to bike Snowdonia. He saw me off to the Gwydyr Trail, a 16-miler threading through the Gwydyr Forest, high above town. The trail was a treat—lots of uphill slogs and curvaceous downhills, stretches of forest so dark I hesitated before plunging in, and entrancing views of Moel Siabod, a 2,861-foot peak, startling me when I re-emerged. The trail is less than two years old, built by the Welsh Forestry Commission, which connected existing forest roads with freshly dug singletrack. The trail map has a nickname for each segment: "Sleepy Bear" marks where one trail builder used to curl up in his wheelbarrow for a nap; "Pigs Might Fly" memorializes a steep line of rollers where a local cop headered. Gwydyr, like Coed y Brenin, is a public woodland run by the forestry commission, gorgeous land balanced between resource extraction and recreation. Wales spent most of the 19th and 20th centuries as the raw-material reservoir for an industrial revolution mainly happening elsewhere; the country is slowly making itself over, but the trails still snake past logged patches and stacks of cut trees. It's something you can see well from a bike—this unfinished transition to a place where coal mines are tourist attractions and the debris from slate mining has been pushed back into the dirt for bike wheels to spin over.

Page:

Thomas Laird has lived in Nepal for the past 30 years. His most recent photography book is The Dalai Lama's Secret Temple. He is completing his first book of non-fiction, Into Tibet. He can be reached at laird100@yahoo.com

•	Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift!

•	Give the gift of Outside Magazine!

•	Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more.