With Ben over from OZ it was a great excuse to go and get up into the big hills again, he doesn’t have many big hills in Perth so figured he would love to get back to some good old fashioned big mountain riding.

The plan was to set off from Loch Muick with the girls, ride to the end and then we would separate and go on our own ways.

We turned North by Glas-Alt-Sheil and headed up the steep path to the water fall. Most of this path for half an hour was pushing or carrying the bike.  Pretty hard work but the sun and the scenery made the time pass quickly.

Once at the waterfall, we stopped, dunked our heads in and topped up our water levels, it was a hot day, amazingly hot for March, this time last year we were skiing in deep snow.  There was virtually no snow left up there.

With our water levels topped up we continued on up, we could at least ride our bikes now up into Corrie an Daimh Mhoile ( non of us could pronounce this apart from Scott).  From here we skirted to the left and toward the direction of the Stuic.  Mainly riding in our granny ring(easiest gear) going off piste and it was slow going but at least we could ride our bikes again.  We Finally reached the path and the progress got faster

Above is Scott and the Stuic in the background.  We followed the path and then descended down Carn a’Choire Bhoidheach which was brilliant, was a relief to not be going up and at last feel some rewards of our hard efforts.  A fantastic descent I had not done before.  Once at the bottom smiling like idiots is was another small push up and around Carn an t-Sagairt Mor ( why can’t they have easier names?!?!?!  I have had to look each one up!)

From here I had done the descent before and this was really what we had come for.  My memory had forgotten a little of the decent and it was better than I remembered.  Truly superb.  It was late afternoon, with a golden light and a superb technical descent in front off us.

As always it soon turned into a race.  All three of us pushing to be first.  Scott was the first to puncture…..  After having a small blonde moment with my pump he worked it out and we were back on our way.  It is a long descent losing around 600m vertical and about 3.5km long.  At the bottom we all had arm pump but one hell of a good descent in the bank.  All there was to do now was ride along the glen and get to the bothy were we were to spend the night.

Once there we were happy to find that we were the only ones there that night, we changed and decided to go and go cook dinner by the loch

Ben had carried a bottle of Glaver (whisky liqueur) with him so that managed to loosen the muscles and soon we went to bed tired and happy.  The rest of the pics can bee seen by clicking here