as much as possible. ’tis fun! beast…

MBR and red bull.

Beast every time (Poss with the short cut at the far end of the Dragon’s back). You’re then doing pretty much all the MBR & Dragons back.

The Tarw is looking it’s age these days (IMHO) with a lot of fireroad & only a few bits of good descent scattered about.

do the start of MBR then half way round take the fireroad to join Dragon’s Back at the start of gomez and finish dragons back, best of both trails

Trailmaps from the Visitors Centre / Bike Shop show the route sincluding roads / fireroads so it’s easy to navigate and miss out a lot of these grindy, pointless climby bits for the sake of a £5 spend

ChrisL – you can skip that loop and avoid the silly steep climb if you take the fireroad off the tarmac road initially as signed, then fork left instead of right at the next junction – this brings you out at the top of the tarmac climb.

Is it just me that doesn’t really mind the long, pointless climbs at CyB?

Nice to have a bit of boring fireroad to chat and cover a bit more distance.

Don’t feel like I’ve done the route properly if I cut bits off.

Chakaping – very true, and on a nice day the views from that bit over to Cadir Idris are stunning. It was fun in 6″ of snow last year too 🙂 .

It is a bit of a dull section otherwise though, especially if the weather isn’t favourable.

you can download and print the trails maps,

As for the long road bit, the fast fire road descent is rough nice. Old school karrimor.

I’d agree – The Beast with shortcuts as described.

There are a couple of shortcuts on the Tawr to cut out quite alot of the fireroad guff, but they’re not as well known as the shortcuts on the beast (Marin as was).

Dammit chaka, you were supposed to keep them and the gaffa tape together! 😛

I’d go and do the Beast, loved it, best thing we did in Wales… One of the best things I’ve done anywhere actually. Tarw was very good too, I think it might be beyond me to do both in a day without having to take it very easy, which would spoil it a bit.

You can do the very start and finish of the Beast as a short loop, which works really well IMO, you still miss an awful lot of good stuff but you get quite a few of the highlights. So when we went back to do Tarw we did another quick lap of that just to lengthen the day, lovely.

Depends how fit you are. I’d do the beast.
But I took my lad and he thought MBR was enough for him and a few more casual riders at the bunkhouse agreed