Another Welsh weekend

A return to North Wales allowed us to complete our tour of the most northern Welsh trail centres. The Marin Trail was a big disappointment. Firstly, the doubletrack just seems to go on and on - it doesn't just take you to the top of fun descents, it undulates along for miles and miles. Secondly, while many of the corners are nicely bermed, lots of them aren't, and if approached at speed will throw you off. (As you can guess, they did, and a week later my knee still hurts to walk). There were very few bits that really left us grinning. The exceptions are the Dragon's Tail section which is nice (though quite loose for a trail centre) and the final descent, which is quite varied and has some cool jumps that even I got air on. As the trail crosses itself fairly early on, it should be possible to do a short loop, includign the finals descent if you only had a short time to fill.

The inadequacies of the Marin Trail were highlighted by a return to Coed y Brenin. This is a really classy trail centre, matched in thre UK only by Kirroughtree and Dalbeattie (IMHO!). The only thing that spoilt the day were the sparsely worded signs explainign which bits of trail were closed, which left us really confused. We ended up on the Dragon's Back Trail, which is basically the Beast minus the supposedly hardest bits, but I think the black here is really not much harder than the red. It's all really great fun though - a real mix of trail styles - some slabs of rock, some big berms, some flowing bits, some rocky bits, some bits that undulate just the right amount so you never have to use your brakes. My only warning is that the bridge over the river (and cross over point of the route) is much lower than you think - so from here you've got a long climb back to the top and a shorter than expected descent to the car park.