we decided to go to fort william yesterday, driving over from aberdeen the day before and camping in the car park for the night…. bad idea.

We drove over in the wet and wind, very bad driving weather. we got there in the dark so found it hard to find a decent place to pitch the tents we eventually found a half decent place to pitch them but was still a bitch trying to put it up in the wind and hoping the pegs would stay in the ground against the strong winds, especially when you try to put pegs in to a forest road surface.

having gone to sleep hearing the heavy rain and wind we hoped it would be better for the morning so we could ride… howeve we didnt expect to wake up to a covering of snow, so you can imagine how gutted we were to wake up to that thinking it would be impossibly slippy to ride the DH and 4X (wich is what we went for).

anyhoo we waited a few hours until we actually rode and it ended up being quite a decent days riding in my opinion, the track was well soggy and covered in snow but still rideable, noone found it any slippier than normal really despite the snow, two of us even managed a quick fly down the bottom half of the DH an neither of us died! it was rather wet and windy and snowy all day tho.

we stayed until it started to get dark and ended up having a pretty good ride and decent day the camping wasnt quite as fun however doing it in the horrid weather does make you feel rather hardcore same with the biking in the extreme weather.

Not really any point in this thread i just thought id let you know unless anybody wants to go on and tell us of thier extreme weather biking experiences.

did you go with the intention of pushing up to the top of the DH track?

😯

no mainly jst to play on the 4x but then we decided the dh didnt look too bad so we had a wee play

Ah, OK how was it? did any of you hit the tripple?

Isn’t the DH track closed during winter to prevent damage and erosion to the track 🙄

well i explined generally in the original post but basically the track was pretty sluggish because of the wet and snow and a few nice boggy buts but still decent ad if you mean the bigjump near the bottom just after that nice drop then yeah that was probably the best bit to play about on.

if the DH track is closed in the winter then oopsies we didnt realise, mind nobody said anything to us then agian i bet nobody could be arsed to come shout at us in the freezin cold, i dont think we did any damage we only did it once 😕

camping in scotland in january!!!! :O

I take it you pushed up the track rather than get the Gondola?

I’m hopefully going there this Saturday but it will be with the ‘board rather than the bike.

Yeah the DH track is shut for the winter. Says so on the nevis range website.

The XC and the 4x are still good to go though, Plus the Caor loop is cracking on a winters day just make sure you take a map.

yeah we had a go at camping haha, didnt mind so much jst should have chosen i better location becuase puttingup the tent on a fire road is horrid.

na we jst pushed up to check it out as iv seen it on all the videos but neveer seen in for myself sowas a bit intregued and we thought we might as well take the bikes up :). yeah there was a few people going up with skis and boards it was probably pretty decent weather to board/ski up top (for scotland andyway).

and really wanted to try some of the xc but all my mates r all DHers booo, so next time when we go up, in the summer!!, then il take an c bike me thinks….