LFGSS Bikepacking Weekend 5: March 9/10, South Wales - now with ride report!

Wales Trip Report

Wow, what a ride. The hardest of my life so far. Two days of unparalleled ups and downs, some of the most rugged riding in the UK and some wild weather made for a thrilling trip.

Please note - if you want to come on one of my bikepacking trips in the future, they are nowhere near as hard as this normally! This was a testing start-of-season adventure.

Day one started at 6am, out of London on the first train to Cardiff and then up the valley to Merthyr Tydfil for 11ish. The four of us set off on our various rigs - T on the Swarf full suspension enduropacking machine, E on his On One with sparkly new cranks and front load, A on a Genesis that has seen many long miles already, and had a natty manual 2x on the front. Me on my ancient Solaris as always, this time with a bit more room in the bags which would prove very useful.

The climb on NCN paths past the Brecon Mountain Railways passed easily, with a little bit of singletrack and fire roads, and before long we were on the sustained rocky climb to The Gap, between Pen Y Fan and Fan Y Big, 600m up. Despite this path being sometimes inundated with mountain streams, the gradient wasn’t too bad, and we had a fair amount of company from weekend walkers, and up to the top in time for a glorious meal of mozarella and peanut butter sandwiches, baked sweet potatoes, and the odd chocolate orange twist, just 2h after leaving the train station. The view in front was enough to tempt a grin to all our faces - a track cut into the mountainside that descended slowly and surely, promising a 15min no-pedal singletrack ride.

T went first at full-sus full-pace (was he even using the brakes?) and we followed in his chunky tracks, although this path is rocky with enough speed it is a hoot to ride! The lower you get the more grass emerges around and then in the middle of the path, which is smooth and lovely for us with crappy/no suspension.

Finally a beautiful sculpted grass hillock dumps you down, 250m lower than the Gap, at a bridle gate, we all smiled from ear to ear at what must be one of the best descents I’ve ever ridden. There was even more after that though! Some narrow bridleways have been cunningly built into further downhill tracks, although rocky they were great to ride and only once below 200m did the descending really stop.

From here we picked up the 3 rivers ride through into Talybont, where rugby foiled a tea stop, and rode fairly briskly along the canal to Crickhowell for late lunch/early dinner.

In Crickhowell we were lucky enough to find a superb cafe that wouldn’t have been out of place in Shoreditch, serving expensive but sumptuous plates of grilled cheese and fried egg sandwiches. T’s trip to the DIY store rewarded us with a 10kg bag of logs for the bothy fire, which we adeptly lashed to our bikes with shoelaces, string, and A’s very handy empty cargo cages. This made the climb out of town very demanding! Gradients of up to 20% that would have been hard enough on a road bike really make you suffer when you’re carrying 4 potatoes and 4 logs strapped to your saddlebag, as I was! The roads narrowed and eventually ran out. With night very much fallen, there remained 10 rough kilometres to the bothy and a bed for the night.

Much cursing, nighttime forest plantation descents, nocturnal sheep encounters, and a long long draggy climb on rocks all in the 30-42 gear, brought us up to near the reservoir where the bothy is. Within striking distance, a pair of walkers emerged to give us the bad news - the bothy (capacity 3-5 people) was full of people already, and they were walking 8 miles back to their car in the dark! With snow starting to fall, we huddled together underneath the last stand of trees below the moor and cursed and tried to figure out what to do. I regretted saying that tents were optional on this ride…