This week I got to go out in the woods with my long-time riding buddy and chief Nzo photographer Graeme Murray. As I have mentioned before, he is one of the top outdoors photographers in the world, and getting involved in a session with him on his day off is always good and very educational.
I shot around to his studio to get some catalogue images of these new Sifters, and he was keen to get out into the trees just for fun, so we went at the earliest opportunity.
G is a master of seeing familiar places in a new or unexpected way. I feel like I know our local patch pretty well after sliding around in it for forty years, but G often produces images here that I can’t exactly place.
This session was all conducted in a much-loved section of the forest within a five minute stroll of a trailhead.
Besides the enforced interval training a photo shoot can entail, we get a chance to see the trails from a different point of view. Standing around while a camera is fiddled with gives me an opportunity to really look at places I normally see through an oxygen-deprived haze or an endorphin-crazed tunnel.
We stopped for a series of exciting if fairly ungainly passages of the Lower Rockdrop. This trail has been in existence for several decades, and traverses a couple of volcanic lumps that pop up out of the dirt we are blessed with around here.
The top Rockdrop feature is essentially the same as it ever was: a narrow gap between two standing boulders, with a small rock between them to roll over.
The Lower example, as seen at the top of this newsletter, has changed considerably. It used to be an exciting roll-over, with an easy B line to the left. The roll-over has slowly become more menacing as the dirt immediately after it has worn away, and I confess I have not executed that line for a very long time.
Standing above it, waiting for the call to ‘Action!’, I had a series of opportunities to really look at the trail. Riders dive down between a little tree and a big rock slab, over a series of haphazardly positioned rocks and into an S bend via another rock (see above). The riding surface is more than a metre below where it once was.
You can see a sort of line along the rock face about level with my posterior, which lines up neatly with a root you can see has been cut at some point in the development of this feature. The root I am talking about is at the left of the image, and was once at ground level.
All that dirt has been removed by bike riders, a few millimetres at a time.
There are faster ways to excavate some rocks, but they are nowhere near as much fun.
PS: The image here shows the amazing Annika Smail on the Lower RockDrop A Line almost twenty years ago. She looks much the same today. The trail, not so much!