Mountain biking smells aren’t just of damp shoes and disappointment. There’s joy to be found in the company of a good trail nose.
Words by Chipps, photography by Mark
Do you remember your first off-road ride? Of course you do. Those tend to be burned in to our memories: the excitement of trying something new, the shock at how well your tyres and bike absorbed the bumps, the sheer terror of the speed and of losing traction on loose ground and, hopefully, the buzz of getting away with it. Of course, your first memory might be of a dull, wet slog through endless muddy trails where you couldn’t even stand upright, let alone ride. And then you punctured and it got dark.
Strong memories either way, although unless you took along your GoPro Mk1/Flipcam or camera, they’ve probably faded from ‘vivid’ to a conveniently muted, but smartly packaged ‘Best of…’ memory of that day or that holiday. A few sunlit high points and dusty corners flit across the screen to a jazzy soundtrack…
But what about those early smells from your riding life? It’s said that smell is the sense that can evoke the strongest memories, but thanks to the random way we often encounter smells they can be hard to call up on demand. Unless you’ve got a scratch’n’sniff book of your life, your meetings with these memories can be hard to pin down with any certainty.
We don’t seem to have much choice over which smell memories (smellories?) get lodged in our brains and which fade away with time. It might be that we’d like to be reminded of the clean mountain air of Avoriaz every time we open a new bottle of ‘Alpine Fresh’ loo cleaner, but you’re more likely to be reminded of that summer spent cleaning chalets in Bognor.
Sometimes, opening a cardboard box, especially a crisp, new bike box flashes me back to the early ’90s, where I spent my early bike industry days happily unpacking and repacking onZa bar ends and Grafton cranks into boxes to be sent to bike shops. Other smells I link to that time can also whisk me back – a particular Magic Tree air freshener puts me straight into the front of in Gez and Sarah Jones’ van back when I’d cadge lifts from the south to far-flung northern bike races. The smell of older tyres, more nylon than ultra-sticky rubber back then. Or even GT85, the universal lube of early mountain biking. And then there’s Tropical flavour High5, though I’m not sure I want to experience that memory again.
Hot pine needles though. Surely a universal smell in our sport and, unless you live in the jaggedy, forested mountains, probably hard to encounter often. But that smell – of warm pine and forest floor – brings back that hard, sweet contrast of the first day of a mountain bike holiday when you’ve left a wet British airport and only a few hours later you’re riding dry trails, feeling welcome sunshine on your pallid skin, listening to cicadas all around and, here and there, in their own little superheated pockets, bursts of hot pine needles.
It’s not all fancy foreign holidays that get triggered by those memories. For me, some of the simplest daily aromas are permanently associated with a single moment in time. Toasting crumpets are always a particularly wet ride where we cracked on a bleak, windswept traverse from one hilltop to another that passed a pub, open on a Sunday afternoon in January. We went in looking for coffee (that’s how bleak it was), but soon switched to pints of beer around the roaring fire. To the right of the fireplace was a stack of crumpets and little pats of butter. For some token amount, perhaps 20p – which was in aid of Mountain Rescue anyway – you could have a crumpet to toast for yourself over the flames of the fire. The smell of a hot crumpet evokes that moment to me. Slowly steaming mountain bikers on a pub sofa, toasting crumpets and not thinking about the second half of the ride which still needed doing.
The one smell that I know I’m probably going to encounter every year with unguarded joy is that of petrichor. It’s a smell you’ll know even if you don’t know the name. This is the official (and scientifically researched) smell that accompanies the first rains after a dry spell. And it’s beautiful; earthy, dusty and evocative. However, unlike other smells that whip me back decades to a long distant encounter with a single moment in time, for me, this glorious, earthy smell brings with it a ‘life flashing before your eyes’ recap of every great ride I’ve done that year. It’s the smell that says ‘Yes, those dusty trails are gone, but just look how you made the most of those long, hot sunny days. They’ll be back.’
And that will have to do us for the winter, until we catch a springtime sniff in the woods that says ‘Hey, is that loam I smell?’