Ice Road Truckers: Loch Ard

Bikes parked in snowy conditions

With a new bike arriving, inevitably the first couple of outings have to be "breaking in" runs, up and down local cycle paths and canal towpaths just to make sure the brake pads are bedded in, the gears are shifting nicely, and no unwanted noises are emanating from hidden corners of the frame. Eventually however, the time comes when the trial runs have to come to an end and the bike has to get its tyres dirty and get tried out on some real terrain.

Being a gravel bike, the best place nearby I could think of with miles of gravel track was Loch Ard, about an hour's drive from Glasgow. I caught up with my good pal Duncan, who also had a fairly fresh bike to take out, and we went for what we thought would be a fairly gentle spin through the woods. I knew the area reasonably well from having done a couple of trail runs on foot round various parts of the forest, and although we had no particular plan for the day, we'd agreed on being out for no more than a couple of hours. We would be setting off from the Loch Ard Forest car park, and I had in mind an objective of maybe trying to reach Loch Lomond via Comer and Gleann Gaoithe, descending to Cailness, along the West Highland Way to Inversnaid, and following the road back up and over to Loch Ard.

The view North to Loch Ard.

The ride started out just as we'd have hoped, with well-surfaced forestry tracks making for smooth riding and good progress. Duncan was trying out his Giant Defy as a gravel bike, and on this sort of surface, with 32mm tubeless tyres and disc brakes, it was coping pretty well. Other than one wee break to pull over and let a timber lorry past us, it was pretty much plain sailing most of the way along towards Comer. I kinda wished I'd stopped to take a photo of a suitably bleak warning sign stapled to one of the gateposts along the way reading "BETTER DEAD SLOW THAN DEAD LAMBS". After getting a wee bit overenthusiastic with a descent, we'd overshot the gate that would take us up the track from Comer into Gleann Gaoithe.

According to my route recce, this would be quite a jump up in elevation, but also represented a significant reduction in riding activity according to the Strava global heatmap, so there were already clues that the going was about to get a bit more tricky. Surely enough, as soon as we were through the gate, we were struggling for traction with rutted, loose, wet gravel under the tyres and steep inclines. We forged ahead for about half a kilometre, but as the track rose higher, we were presented with the additional difficulty of snow and ice patches, as well as a further deteriorating surface. While in dry weather, a mountain bike might've made light work of it, my G-One Bites were struggling, and Dunc's nearly-slicks didn't seem to be giving him much joy, so we decided the best move was to make a u-turn and head back to the relative comfort of the forestry tracks.

Our turning point, overlooking Comer towards Ben Lomond.

There was little sense of disappointment at our failure to progress, as our turning point had an amazing view back across Gleann Dubh towards a snow-covered Ben Lomond, and all the height gained made for a fun, if seriously sketchy descent. If there's one thing I'll say in defence of gravel bikes, they can make any regular farm track descent utterly terrifying again through the joy of drop bars and no suspension!

Having foreseen this as a probable outcome, I'd also decided on a plan B, and figured a good route back to the car park through the forest, crossing over to the southern side of the Duchray water on a utilitarian concrete bridge, climbing to a pass above the Bruach Caorainn Burn, and then descending back to the east. From the concrete bridge, things were back to moving along smoothly again, with only a few rogue slushy snow patches to hinder our progress, or so we thought.

As we climbed towards the pass, the increasing height meant an increasing prevalence of snow patches, but we carried on climbing, pressing through the slush with increasing difficulty. Eventually, a point was reached where it was simply impossible to carry on. Again, my Schwalbe G-One Bites were helping me eke out a wee bit of grip where Duncan's tyres couldn't, but even so, pedalling had to be abandoned in favour of pushing.

View from behind my handlebars.

Snow as we approached the bridge at the top of the pass.

Duncan regretting his choice to wear shorts.

Eventually, after a bit of a slog, we reached the bridge at the top of the pass, stopped for a quick snack break, and looked forward to figuring out if the snow would be any more fun on the way back down. After a few failed attempts to hang on, we reluctantly decided to carry on pushing til the snow thinned, despite it being anathema to everything we believed in to waste some potentially perfect descending.

Once we were back on two wheels, we did still manage to get some descent-based joy en route back to the car park, passing by several of the impressive Victorian-era aqueducts forming the Loch Katrine to Glasgow water supply pipeline. From then on, it was an easy decision to stop at the Forth Inn in Aberfoyle for some carb-rich lunch and a bit of heat to restore feeling to our well-chilled fingers and toes.

Notes:

• Ross: Ribble CGR 725
• Duncan: Giant Defy Advanced 2
• Navigation: OS Maps app on iOS, paper map as backup
• Strava Activity