Having booked a family holiday to Begur on the Costa Brava the obvious option for fitting some riding into the break seemed to be the Pyranees, approximately three hours away. However, after lots of web-surfing I found pureriding.eu, offering ‘enduro’ and downhill near Girona, just over an hour from our base.
I planned for two days of guided riding at 95 Euros each, and decided to hire a Mondraker Dune for a bargain 35 Euros a day. The riding was absolutely amazing!
First up was a trip to what Pure Riding describe as their mini-Whistler, a woods on the outskirts of the fairly innocuous-looking Santa Coloma de Farners. We started on what Jordi descibed as the ‘easy’ run, intriguingly dubbed ‘Spiderman’. It was lovely flowy singletrack interspersed with jump after jump after jump. They were all of the size that I can do, but only just, so it was really good practice, especially as the surface was a tad sketchy, with lots of little stones keeping my unfamiliar Maxxis Ardents working hard. There was one around halfway down which I tried to roll and definitely should have jumped, the forks threatened to ping me over the ‘bars and I’ve no idea how I stayed on. Attacking them confidently was undoubtedly the way forward. The other three descents showed why Spiderman was classed as easy. Jordi described the second one as 100 times more technical than that first jumpy run and while this was an exaggeration the next three descents were constantly tough but awesome fun. The entire ride included over 4500ft over climbing, significantly more than I’m used to, but it was the descending that exhausted me. It was all singletrack, all steep and all difficult, but all doable and really rewarding. Each downhill lasted around 7-8 mins and included around 700ft of vertical descent.
The only negative to this location could be the climbing which almost entirely forest road with the odd technical section. We repeated the same climb each time, with only a slight variation the final two times. However, if this was a necessary sacrifice for such a consistently unbelievable level of descending then it was well worth it. This trip was all about the downs anyway, and day two include uplift…
So my second day’s riding was from Pure Riding’s base in the pretty town of Osor in the Susqueda region. Instead of their branded van, our uplift vehicle was a battered 23-year-old Nissan Patrol which battled gamely against some pretty steep and windy terrain to deposit us at the top of four tremendous descents. A highlight was at the drop off point for the second descent when Jordi backed it into a tiny clearing amongst the dense undergrowth, stalled, and announced it had a flat battery. A quick push later and it was up and running again, but I love the fact that this aged vehicle was slogging up some fearsome and narrow climbs with a push-start as the only way to get it going if it did stall.
Back to the riding. We started the first descent at the peak of St Benet, some 1144m or 3600ft above sea level, and descended over 2000ft almost entirely on flowy, twisting, and often technical singletrack. The descent had everything and finished with a stunning view of the Susqueda reservoir and dam. The next one was nearly as long and again had bags of flow but also some seriously difficult bits. One rocky corner had me over the ‘bars. Getting back on the bike I realised I’d forgotten to switch Strava on, only to discover a thoroughly smashed phone in my pocket – oh well it was over two years old anyway. I had two more mishaps on steep switchback corners – this was one testing descent. We didn’t get quite as high for the next drop but it was still very, very good – and I made a better fist of staying on the bike this time. The first descent was over 15 minutes long, with the others topping ten mins. The final run was shorter, just four or five mins through a bike park they’re building, and for the first time Jordi opened up in front of me and left me for dead. Impressive. It was seriously steep but I got down in one piece ready for a rather pleasant tootle through the town. The skies were leaden now, and the heavens opened and it hammered down just as we pulled up back at the campsite. See the footage below the pics of the first three descents of this day, unfortunately my GoPro had no charge on the first ride.
gorillainthepeak 