Ride report - Mountain biking in Denmark - Bruno - July 18th 2003

Part 1 - Dyrehaven

(Part 2 - Going singletrack)
(Part 3 - Clean up and statistics)
(Back to the frontpage)

Now does this make sense at all. Riding a mountain bike in a country with "peaks" no higher than 171 metres(561 feet) - not counting Faroe Islands and Greenland - In my view it does but we are talking XC and not DH :-)

To give an idea of what it is like I have written this ride report to tell a little of how I experience riding on my home turf and there are also some pictures as well.

I live on the outskirts of Copenhagen some 10 kilometres from the absolute centre and on the same time I'm pretty close to where the fun starts. Usually I can reach off-road on my bike in something between 5 and 10 miniutes, actually there is a lake only 200 metres from my home but it is a totally falt area which is fine for running or walking the dog but dull on a bike.

For this ride I took a pretty relaxed aproch to the whole thing since I knew stopping every once in a while to take photos would kill my rythm. And instead of my normal route I decided to take one a little longer in order to get a bit around in the whole area. So this ride starts with me commuting on my bike to Dyrehaven (Animal garden  would be a rough translation) which is an enclosed park/forest area norht of Copenhagen that is big enough to hold a golf course, the worlds oldest amusement park "Bakken" (The Hill - another rough translation),  an open air theatre while still being a forrest with lots of wildlife and even some single track.

I took my first photo just down the road and if you look carefully you will notice the bike lanes and even traffic lights exclusive for us bikers, this pretty much represents how most city streets look but of course there isn't a Toyota dealership on every other corner.



A few hundred metres later I got gravel under the tires



And next I entered Dyrehaven. This snapshot of the map should give you some idea of the place.



The trails in the most of Dyrehaven is really gravel roads and there also lots of riding paths for horses, so whenever I ride there it's usually with pretty high speeds when it's down hill but today I only reached around 50 km/t (31 MPH) because I just had to stop a snap some pictures of the wildlife. Maybe that was also for the better since I did have an exciting moment or two since the gravel is very loose and control at high speeds is somewhat of an illusion - going more than 70 km/t is not out of the question on a good day.

The wildlife is very used to people and if you don't stop you can pass them within only 2-3 meteres but if you stop like I did then they won't let you closer than aprox. 10 meter.





While I find wide gravel tracks to be good fun at high speed once it's flat or going uphill it's more a warm up thing - but then I try to remember the philosophy saying  one only deserves to ride down when one has ridden up. Dyrebakken is nice for warm up or to introduce someone to mountain biking and it's perfect for taking your better half on a picnic.





(Part 2 - Going singletrack)