Snow Way Through

Me and The Boy only really started our serious cycling in the sweltering days of early August last year. It was short sleeved shirt and shorts time and we soon bore our distinctive cyclists sun tan of half arms and half legs, almost like a Neapolitan ice cream in human form.

The decision process whether to go out for a ride at that time was easy. If it was one or more of daylight hours, blue sky, sunshine, above twenty degrees centigrade and dry then we were out in our flashy team gear ready to take on shopper bikes, electric cycles and mobility scooters.

We could set off with the assurance that it would not rain for the duration and we would be bathed in glorious warmth to keep that strange patterned tan topped up.

Even if not on two wheels and just in summer clothes we would be instantly recognised as cyclists or perhaps painters of motorway barriers which I feel would be the only real activity to achieve anywhere near the same stripey skin tone appearance.

The light evenings meant that we could set off about 4pm, if I skipped work early, and have three hours as rouleurs before the chill and dusk set in.

We watched with increasing dismay as the nights began to draw in by mid to late September and if we misjudged distance and time we would have to sneak back through town in failing visibility risking being hauled up for not having a set of lights.

The final ride for 2012 was on a weekend in November and the mountain bikes were power washed down and prepared for a hibernation in the garage. We would keep a watching brief on whether a ride would be possible in the coming harsher months.

Like the thoroughbreds we now believed ourselves to be we would pace up and down looking for any optimism in the weather but there was little or no meaningful daylight, the skies were grey or darker, the sunshine weak and insipid, temperatures in single figures either just positive or below zero and the air thick with every form of precipitation. Conversations between us were becoming centred on justifying how poor any cycling attempt would be in the prevailing conditions.

Gradually a criteria for winter riding was formulated and we managed to start up again quite quickly in 2013 but entirely on the surfaced roads rather than taking to off road paths, tracks and bridleways which were still gloopy and impassable.

January had some reasonable weekend weather and this held up in February. A few rides were possible, each just around 20 miles before frostbite and face-ache set in. However, the heavier cold air and falls of snow in March were deterrent enough to venture out. It would just be unpleasant on bodily extremities and quite painful to facial projections.

The upshot has been that until today we have had an enforced lay-off from the bikes. We have walked over 60 miles around the town but never wandering more than a mile away from the house. Our route goes up and down a series of parallel streets and avenues, some quite long inclines and then onto the exposed Humber Foreshore before clambering up through the Country Park, under the carriageway of the suspension bridge and back down the hill. The pace is relentless with The Boy always half a stride ahead which is mightily annoying. He never keeps a straight line and, intentionally or not, I find myself squeezed into a hedge or on a couple of occasions my momentum has taken me up someone's driveway like a grand prix pit stop rather than crash through the boundary fence.

Our stamina has been much improved, well at least after getting over the agonising shin splints in the first mile or so. To shake off this agonising deep boned pain  involves a bit of a hop, skip and jump which to homeowners on the route may be either entertaining or downright disturbing.

I was fully prepared, today, to just go for a walk but The Boy expressed disappointment in my broaching this type of activity as he wanted to go cycling. The criteria for winter riding were barely met. It was a borderline, touch and go situation. The Boy won. 

It was an effort to get motivated to put the roof bars and cycle carriers on the car notwithstanding that it was cold and breezy. A mere four degrees centigrade smacked of recklessness to me. I persisted and after a swift re-education in how to securely fix bikes to the roof rack I tracked down my riding gear, checked the spares, pumped up the cold, hard tyres and lifted the surprisingly heavy pair of machines into position.

As soon as we reached the dual carriageway there was a strange rapping and knocking from somewhere above our heads. When you need somewhere to execute an emergency stop there is no hard shoulder, slip road or lay-by to hand and at minimal acceptable speed amongst HGV's and the usual dense flow of traffic I crawled along until a parking area loomed up. The noise was nothing more than a flapping strap.

As a precaution I checked all the fixings again and once more before being satisfied that we would not be cited on the local traffic news as the cause of an obstruction on the carriageway.  I was not really sure of our destination and mental maps popped up of the previous summers idyllic days out until a route sprang to mind. Then we had been smacked in the face by flying bugs, dodged slow moving bumble bees and skittish butterflies, paced comically moving wildfowl up the lanes, weaved around grazing livestock and their oversized faecal mounds. Today we started the ride in the swirling dry powder from successive days of the activity of gritting lorries.

On the steep slope of the Medieval sounding Trundlegate hill we carved a track through banks of packed ice and snow and sloshed through the melt waters which were flowing quite fast in the opposite direction. It was bitterly cold and the easterly wind which we had calculated would be part foe and part ally to a cyclist decided to behave erratically and we had no respite from swirling and strong gusts.

I was prepared to look The Boy in the eye with an expression along the lines of ' a walk would have been less taxing' but he was waltzing away well up the slope resuming another of his annoying traits, that of leaving me behind which he had practiced to a fine art last summer.

We were after all at the highest point on the Wolds and even though there had been no fresh snow falls for a week the persistence of the cold temperatures had ensured that much of it was in situ. We crossed the main road and continued along a single track lane.

A few vehicles and the Post Lady in her red van passed by, just, if we rode on the permafrost verge. All of them came back which suggested that they had collectively taken a wrong turn or delivered the mail, respectively. I joked about errant Sat-Navs.

The reason soon became clear.

The road was blocked by a snow drift- in late March- and this stretched for as far as the eye could see. It was inconceivable that, in 21st Century England and just a few miles from a major regional city, our passage was thwarted by such a thing. I had not seen anything like it before. It was real snow as I found out on trying to get a front wheel on it and not a film set for Doctor Zhivago 2.

Put it down to cuts in Local Authority services or just a massive oversight it was still inexcusable and especially so as it added another 6 miles to our ride just to get to where the road resumed on the far side of the starting point of the New Ice Age.