Coed y Brenin advice

Folks, am heading to Coed y Brenin this weekend and hope to do a few of the trails (sat / sun / mon), there are quite a few trails and we would normally do red and black routes so really wanting to know which trials to prioritise – are some generally considered better than others so if you only went there once you must try a particular trail type of thing. Opinions please.

Cheers

the tarw one i found the most enjoyable which is the old karrimor trail i think? anyway a good trail. The beast is also very good but does have a big fire road climb in it but the decent the other side is amazing. The existing MBR route is also good, those are the three i would do. 😆

do the beast but miss the long loop (top right on map & waste of time IMO) after the cafe stop half way round , by going straight up the steep road, join forest track and look for the adams family on your left.

CyB holds up really well in the wet, have fun!

Abels a must, Begineing the end just re-opened very good
Snap Crackel Pop
Can do the whole thing in one day, then the two other days
pick and choose which floats your boat.

How long for the Beast for the pretty fit and able? I'm going to land at around 12:30/1pm and while I will have lights as a back up, I won't be carrying the full lumen count.

It says 3-6 hours, I did the Wall followed by Penhydd in around 3 hours on singlespeed (I will be on geared full suss for CyB). Is the 3 hour end doable?

A couple of years ago we did The Beast starting at about lunchtime, following a previous days riding & previous evenings hangover.
We pootled round and to be honest, took ages. Sure enough the cloud came in and it got dark very quickly – we only had small head torches with us & the last few miles were taken very carefully & a bit foolishly.

If you start about 12 and don't hang around, you should be fine but it might start to get pretty dull towards the end, particularly in the singletrack sections. I'd aim to start an hour earlier just to be sure.

I did the MBR about a month ago after not going there for about 18 months & really enjoyed it, but the Tarw (old Red Bull) is good fun too.

Well the start time is dictated by dropping the mrs off at work in Bristol for 8:45 :lol:, the arrival of 12:30/1pm could easily be earlier but I'm assuming I'll hit traffic or something…

I'm planning on motoring around as good as non-stop except for snacking stops. Maybe I should pack bigger lights… :-/ I'm up there for the weekend doing a REC 1st aid so was trying to travel light regarding the bike…

Just make sure you have a map of the place, as you can the see the fire road escape routes if it does look like it's gonna get too dark.

We managed to get round, but with small camping head torches it wasn't much fun. A 'proper' helmet mounted torch or similar would probably be OK.

download the pdf maps from http://www.mbwales.com/

if time is tight do the dragons back route, its a fair bit quicker and if when you reach the 'beginning of end' (the last bit of the route) you have some daylight head up 'brutus' to do 'cain, abel & false teeth'. this does mean another slog up the forest track to reach 'the beginning of the end' tho.