[Closed] weirdest surface you've ridden on?

Half a story there. How come you came to find yourself riding on dry ski slop moguls?

Moab slickrock

2 inch deep gravel in a dried out Spanish mel****er riverbed

Hardpack, dusty singletrack in the UK.

A snowy footpath which had partially melted and then frozen hard leaving a glassy rippled surface with almost no friction. I couldn't walk on it but could jus cycle slowly, half inflated tyres helped.

Goyb, he said weirdest, not rarest

Sorry.

Same again soon Chris?

Moab slickrock. Really weird to be able to climb/descend/traverse 30% gradients without the wheels just sliding away.

We have some very odd shaped and slippy "north shore" style bridges on one of my fave trails. Put there by the local forestry bods to help folks walk over gaps and small gorges through the woods.
They are cut down trees, round with branches cut off, not sliced through to create a flat surface, noooo that would be too easy, they've left them log shaped and they are both very odd to walk over and ride.
When wet they're a nightmare.

I've yet to understand the logic, so too the folks that have so far broken ankles and twisted knees on them. 🙄

BIG volcanic ash slopes on La Palma.

Steer with you arse/hips...

weirdest stuff deep bark chippings in binley woods brandon cov the chippings were fresh cut and laid about 5 inch deep so strenght sapping and tricky to hold a line.

Moab slickrock +1

Alta Lake in Whistler in February.. from our chalet across to rainbow park. Almost 1.5km of frozen lake.. hilarious yet painful!

podge - yep, but less mincing this time

Volcano shale in lanzarote, sliding everywhere but with loads of grip!

The top of the mega route, snow was mega slippy yet the ice on the glacier was quite grippy

The Sarenne Glacier on the 2011 Mega. All the snow had gone, and it was an odd mix of ice, rock, stones & grit.

One second it was super grippy, next I was flat on my arse sliding down the slope.

Field of spuds, where the foot deep furrows match the distance between wheels, up, down, up, down, up, down. Very difficult to ride!

Synthetic leather. I rode over me mates foot... 😀

Top of the Mega course actually. Slightly melted snow with hard-iced ruts... funny as.

Catton Park when parts of the course was sodden underneath but hard pack on top as the sun had quickly dried the top surface.

They had a magnetic grass field one year to!

2 inch deep gravel in a dried out Spanish mel****er riverbed

I've done that, it kind of felt like skiing.

I used to ride over the racecourse at Epsom quite regularly and they used to put huge - sort of - door mats across the course. It was squirmy, hard to ride in a straight line and momentum sapping. Weird.

A wet halfpipe.

Something you only do once though

Volcanic stones/pebbles in gran Canaria... As said above, steer with you hips. A lot like riding in deep snow. Good fun, but takes a while to get used to.

Near perfect sheet ice. I stayed upright for a few hundred feet and then the inevitable happened and my foot ended up pointing in a very unnatural direction...

The scariest and least forgiving I encounter is the "wet clay under leaves" , found at Epping and quite a bit in Herts. You can be riding along with good traction on a nice autumnal bed of leaves and whoosh you go sideways when the under surface suddenly changes to clay. Riding on roots compared to that are a doodle. The only way of preventing a bail out is always being ready and properly balanced. Even then there is no chance of holding a camber when you are traversing a slope as the tyres may grip the leaves, but the leaves certainly don't grip clay!

A strange rutted (8" deep laterally across the path) bridleway somewhere on the Southdowns, which was hard packed mud, with an inch of wet slippery mud on top, where i think horses had effectively pounded the track into perfect evenly spaced "waves", where these waves were spaced almost perfectly a bike wheelbase apart. As mentioned above really dam hard to ride, and after about 100 yards i felt really quite queasy! 😉

Sun baked mud over gravel/pebbles.

I decided whilst riding a bit of local coast path, to nip off the path and ride across what looked like dry mud, it was crazed in such a manner that each piece had baked like dinner plates. It was basically clay silt from high tides, that had covered a bed of golf ball sized pebbles.
As i rode over it, they rocked, pivoted and generally moved around in a bizarre way. Strange sensation and interesting sound too.
Even more odd as it seemed to be the last time i recall such conditions on a British summer ride.

I found the cobblestone bit after the fast descent through the woods at Mountain Mayhem surprisingly difficult.

My brother's head. Mountain biking's gone down the tubes since the 90s.

Thick volcanic ash in Iceland and thin crusts over near boiling sulphur springs

The donkey track down to Portman in Murcia. Like riding over baby's heads. Repeatedly.

The steps at Butterley Reservoir

Ice rink in Finland, wasn't to bad just no sudden movements

Clay with small pebbles in ploughed field, grippy but slippy and slimy even with tyres bunged up and frame with the clag until bike just got to heavy to even lift and carry. I always avoid that local field now if it been ploughed or is any way wet.

Huge coconut mats on Epsom race course. They don't look like they will cause problems but could have a less skilled or good looking rider off.

Two spring to mind. The damp slatey surface at Whinlatter through the woods. Kept thinking my rear axle/bearings were gone the back end was so squirmy, but not completely all over the place.

Second, the Grey Earth section of the Trans Provence. Looks like it should be loose and drifty, but its super grippy and great fun to hammer natural bermy, jumpy, gullies and bankings without worrying about washing out.

In 2012 - dry singletrack. I had forgotten what it felt like. Weird!!!

huge turf blister in mid wales...
grass on rock with water inbetween, the grass was rippling I thought i was having a flashback

Loose slates in an old quarry somewhere in Cumbria (Crazylegs will know the exact place).
Very tuneful but felt like I was going to slide all over the show. Finally got the confidence to go quite quickly and was a great experience.

A slate spoilheap somewhere in mid-Wales in the wet: slip, slide, spinout, and repeat.

conveyor belt.

i didnt take off.

Frogs.

Riding up at Mugdock, and suddenly the trail was totally covered in millions of baby frogs. Tried bunny hopping to minimise ground time...

Hit the North 🙂

@maxtorque - sounds like Wolstonbury Hill.
Since getting my 29er, I've found it a bit easier - the slightly longer wheelbase prevents front & rear from rising/falling at the same time.

Waterloo station escalator, whiskey made me miss the last train!

Gonna get hate mail again for this one but what the hell, this isn't a popularity contest is it?.........

I've rode down the carcass of a 65ft fin whale that was washed up on a local beach.....there....i've said it, I've still got the pic in my flickr account but i'm not about to post it on here again as the amount of hate mail and abuse i received from when i posted it on here 7years ago was out of proportion - I did not kill it, it was no different to poking about a dead fish or whatever washed up on the beach....if it makes you feel any better a few months earlier i found a Killer Whale carcass washed up further along the coast and i reported some of the locals for attempting to remove it's teeth with an axe (i heard who it was in the pub)...that was sick and disrespectful of them but a bike ride of a whale isn't that bad..... really?.

It was long dead (the smell from 1mile gave it away) and in my defence i'd like to admit to being a vegi for 20+yrs and lifelong animal lover that has never knowingly killed another animal in my life apart from pheasants with the car which don't count really as they are stupid and the odd suicidal rabbit, So i decided to ride down it's back and off it's tail as a tribute to the second largest mammal on the planet as i would never get the chance again to achieve such a feat in my lifetime again unless i enrolled on a japanese research ship and that will never happen. It was rather dicey to ride on it as the oils were seeping out the skin (it was summer) and making it extremely slippery so i threw some sand over it for grip and proceeded to ride down the back but i forgot about the tail section which was sitting in a pool of whale oil/blubber and my front wheel washed right out and i slid/surfed flat on my stomach right through the most foul, retchingly throw-your-guts up oily/sticky fluid that has ever been my misfortune to land in, this is no word of a lie but i was so physically sick with the stench that i was starting to choke, i could not get the smell out of my nostrils or skin for days despite showering constantly using a pot & pan green scouring pad with a varied mixture of jif, bleach, mr muscle, milton fluid, Ajax floor cleaner etc till my skin was red raw.

I learnt my lesson and i'm not proud but i was 7yrs younger than what i am now and the thought of the stench on my skin can still make me dry retch and make my eyes water even to this day.

I apologise 🙁

I've no idea belugabob, i'm not from around them parts, and was too busy trying to hang on to the back wheel of my "guide" who was pedaling like a man possessed, so he didn't loose me in the middle of knowhere.... 😉

Bubblewrap - great fun 😀

What a compelling tale Somafunk 🙂

But on the plus side Somafunk, you have cycled over a whale, and not even the biketricklunatic DannyMac has done that! 😉

My god stw has changed?........this time 7 years ago i was getting threats of physical violence and my mail account was filled with such vitriolic hate that i avoided the website for weeks.

Wanna see a pic or two?....for 5mins only then i'll take them down as it may upset folk and i really do not want that again, it was on my singlespeed as well and i found 32x16 as a ratio worked best for whale hucking

Yes, pics!

Golf course on acid, full moon. Endless suspension....on a full ridged.

hell yes!

edit : I've left one pic up for scale, and it's not a bad one so i can sleep t'night without the fear of being hunted down by the STW whale conservation society

up for 5 mins only then i'm editing the post, and for what's it worth it died out at sea and was washed up.

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It was pretty big

No pics of me actually riding it as my gf and mate both took videos of me riding down it and when i fell off and slid through the oil n' blubber pool nr the tail they ran away as i unfortunately broke through the skin of the tail and they were retching and throwing up and wouldn't let me within 50 ft of them on the 7 mile cycle back home.

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What tyres for? (dead whale) 😉

somafunk killed a whale?

Big whale!

The video needs putting up!

😀 I don't think Somafunk's post can be topped!

maxtorque - Member

What tyres for? (dead whale)

Moby Nics.

^^^ Brilliant 😉

Blubber queens??

somafunk wins.

Luckily for most of STW, they don't have an ancient (and pretty ill right now) dog breathing directly at them giving them the full frontal nasal horror of dog breath*

*the dog breath probably smells about as bad as a composting sea mammal.

Gutted I missed the whale riding picture 🙁 Soma wins by a nautical mile though.

Having achieved today a long held ambition to cycle round my local supermarket (only two of us on duty) I was impressed with the grippyness of the marble flooring. However, the wind has been completely taken out of my sails by the excesses of the previous story, and I will have to sink back into obscurity once again. Somafunk you have my undying respect for having told the best story on here for ages ( in fact only picolax made me laff more).

Somafunk that's Whaley Offal.

Frozen loch riding for me, a once in a lifetime chance not to be missed.

As a student at the Edinburgh College of Art, we sneaked our bikes in one night after the janitors had locked the main doors for those working late. We had races around the upper level of the sculpture court on surprisingly driftable terracotta tiles.

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I've ridden all over Wales- does that count?

Somafunk- do not be ashamed of that amazingness that you took advantage of.

I was going to say it was the snoflex sheeting they'd put on some of the north shore in Morgins "to imporove grip"

I can't believe somafunk didn't have another run at the whale tail trail - once you're covered in decomposing sea mammal you're not gonna make it any worse.

I think it was just a fluke that soma got to ride a whale tail.

Can't top riding on dead whale but in a similar vien a beach covered in thousands of dead jelly fish. It made a lovely squeltchy noise but I did worry that I was going to flick a bit of "sting" up into my eye off the front wheel.

The surface on the floor at the car park at Milleniun point in brum. It was like riding on sandpaper, incredibly grippy, uiu could corner brilliantly on it.

Can't believe no one's said "Trans-Whales" yet.

Ok just me.

Adie took us on a trail he's opened near Molini called "Cop Killer". He'd cut section through a forest that I can only describe as "brown powder" due to it's loose soil consistency reminding me of snowboarding in light powder snow. The first couple of turns were rather scary until you realised the trick was to just "switch edges" on the bike and let the tyres drift into the natural grooves and berms that had formed while the soil sprayed about. Very cool.

Both in Tenerife:
Thick layers of pine cones over loose cinder - I'm not the best at riding loose stuff and was bowel looseningly loose.
Pumice rock formations - Amazingly grippy but I was too conscious of the 'don't fall off all you will lose all your skin warning' to push it that hard.

Deep virgin powder snow. Had to carry the bike to the top of the steep sections and then just point down and hope. You end up in a strange snowy cocoon as the powder flies all around you and you can't really steer or even tell if you're the right way up. It's a rare thing though. Finding a steep slope accessible enough that has no tracks is no mean feat and it's just not the same following tracked out trails.
Got a new fat bike for riding snow (if we ever get any worth riding) and beaches. I shall now be searching for washed up mammals 🙂

While trail riding through a meadow in the Pyrenees, what I thought were meadow flowers suddenly took off into the air. It was a field of white butterflies. No strictly riding on but through. Possibly one of my life's most uplifting moments.

alcantara seats in the back of a ford S max 😆

Loose slates in an old quarry somewhere in Cumbria

I think I rode that recently. It was called "Greek Wedding" because of the sound of smashing plates.

I've rode down the carcass of a 65ft fin whale that was washed up on a local beach

Heck I've eaten whale in Norway In my defence if I had known what it was I wouldn't have.