Waking up at 5.30am on Sunday morning, I was greeted by several inches of proper, squeaky snow. And not a road in sight.
Of course at first this was hilarious, beautiful and rather different, but then the reality of standing round all day in the cold set in - but I thought I’d be able to sneak off and rip up the trails with like-minded bikers.
Unfortunately the white stuff falling from the sky had such a bad effect that police on the M4 turned the MBUK wagon round, complete with the workers we were relying on to make the event run smoothly as usual.
So it was down to myself, the event manager Grant and our events girl Lyndsey to make things happen. Which boiled down to myself and Lyndsey holding the fort and building our temporary office for the day whilst Grant was running round helping people in the field, which started resembling Glastonbury by 9am. This was going to be messy…
Still, with hot tea on the go, punters were rolling in - the weather obviously affected a fair few people, but there were over 120 that braved the quite frankly foul conditions and got to work wearing out the Demo bikes with nature’s finest grinding paste.
Surprisingly, no-one was injured badly in the conditions- just a few cuts and scrapes - although the Extreme Medics were on full time duty towing people out the car park all day which turned in to shin-deep slop.
Thankfully the Red Bull crew were there keeping everyone buzzing with god-knows how much of the stuff, and the Aston Hill crew headed by Richard Abbot were working themselves silly making sure everything ran smoothly.
For those that don’t know, Aston Hill is now fully up and running on a pay per ride basis - if you haven’t been there then you really should get over there for some shredding on the XC, 4X and the variety of DH tracks there - if the riding was this good in winter slop, it’ll be amazing once the trees start sucking up the juice…