Coed y Brenin

With rain forecast in afternoon, we dragged ourselves out of bed early to get down to Coed y Brenin for an early (ish) ride on sunday morning. Having seen work in progress at the new visitor centre and on the trails earlier in the year when Tony was kind enought to show us round what was then a mass of builders and jcb's, we were keen to see how it had all panned out.
It was pretty quite in the carpark when we turned up, but then not everyone wants to get up early on a sunday, and we parked pretty much right next to the door to the cafe, in the very attractive but slightly odd toadstool shaped visitor centre. The views from the balcony in the centre, looking down the valley to the mountain of Cadair Idris, are phenomenal.
In the cafe, getting our caffeine hit (at very modest prices) we bumped into Sian and Dafydd, who of course used to run the old cafe at Coed y Brenin. Having taken a 'bit of time out' from the mtb business, seems they are looking to start something new again - with talk of maybe a cafe/mtb base up in Betws y Coed right on the doorstep of the Penmachno and the Marin Trail - now I'm sure there are a lot of us would love that. Betws has been crying out for a good mtb base for a long time.

After caffeine it was definately time to hit the trail. We decided to go for 'The Dragon's Back' which at 31km long and graded red, seemed to be more or less the old Karrimor trail. Starting just behind the new visitor centre, with no warm up apart from a large latte, you are sraight into a series of rocky steps and boulders, which seem to last for a lot longer than you are quite prepared for at this stage. This then takes you into a very fast flowing section of earthy singletrack reminiscent of some of the 7stanes stuff. From here you drop down onto the fire road and then are back onto familiar ground following signs up through 'big doug' and the now very tight and rutted 'Hermon' singletrack. This dropped us off nicely at the Forest Cafe for our second cuppa of day. From here we decided to give the trip up to Moel Hafodwen a miss and skip up road and straight onto the always excellent singletrack of 'Gomez, Uncle Fester and all'. Not dissapointed, this is old school coed y brenin riding at its best.

Following this it was back on to fire roads for a big climb before the final descent and some more new track leading back to the Visitor Centre. Like the early sections of new trail, lots of big boulders and rock steps keep you on your toes and an endlessly switchbacking track milks the distance for all its worth. Finally a series of jumps, allthough inviting airtime, is edge with some nasty looking boulders, (i decided to stay firmly on the ground), finished off with a strange rocky drop onto a road of all things.

I enjoyed the riding of course, Coed y Brenin never disappoints, even as other trails move on. I couldnt help but feel though that it would have been better to spread out all the new sections around the trail rather than have them all right next to the Visitor Centre. But then maybe that was the plan - you could probably do quite a lot of posing on the new stuff if you wanted to.

Other 'new' trails at Coed y Brenin include:
The Tarw Trail - on the old visitor centre side. 20km, red. Another of Dafydds early combos incorporating old Flight Path into the Red Bull
The Beast - 38km, black. Very similar to the CyB combo in the Snowdonia guidebook
Yr Afon Trail - A new family 10km friendly ride along the lovely Mawddach and Eden rivers