Chipps offers a Lake District loop that has great views and challenging trails, but which keeps to a lower level and is rideable all year round.

WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY CHIPPS

The gravity pull of a marked forest centre trail can be very strong. Leaving the warm confines of the café, you simply need to follow the siren call of the coloured arrows and you’ll be guaranteed a circular, predictable and repeatable ride. There’ll be no unannounced drops or sudden corners, very little in the way of multiple line choice (or any line choice for that matter), no livestock or gates, and it’s entirely possible that you’ll only have to put a foot down when you finish the ride, back where you started and in time for pudding.

Sometimes, especially when the weather isn’t all that great, that’s exactly what you need – a ride where you know precisely what you’re going to get. It’s the mountain bike equivalent of a McMeal; go anywhere in the country, pick a red route and you’ll know roughly what you’ll find.

Not all of us are after that level of predictable consistency though. In the same way that no good stories start with someone eating a salad and drinking a bitter lemon, it’s rare that a mountain bike centre is the subject of an epic riding tale. They never really seem to get properly ‘outdoors’, leave the canopy of the forest or offer up any decent views. By all means park there if you want, trail centres have great car parks and cafés used to the ways of the mountain biker. Sometimes they even have showers and heated changing rooms.

But where?

Where do we go to find this mystical ‘outdoors’ though? The lure of the coloured arrows is strong. Quite often, though, the freedom you seek is closer than you think. Just miss out a turning and carry straight on and suddenly you’re in a new part of the forest, far from the built trail (and other riders).

That chink in the trail centre armour can be hard to find though, so to give us the best chance of escaping orbit, Beate and I from Singletrack teamed up with three (three!) Lakeland mountain bike guides to show us some of the best bits of the outside world surrounding Grizedale Forest.

Rich Martin is from bike shop and training provider Cyclewise and, though based up at Whinlatter Forest most of the time, he does a lot of mountain bike guide training using the trails around Grizedale. It was with Rich that I did my own guiding training, so I knew that we’d be in knowledgeable hands. Joining him was our old friend Rob O’Dowd and Irishman Nick Watson – both also mountain bike guides who know the forest inside out. Should we need navigating out of trouble, I reckoned we’d be covered.