MTB ride (SS) – 20 miles

A shortish ride last night, I didn’t set off until after 9pm again once the kids were in bed so I kept it local. Most of the route is under tree cover so on a dark night it’s really dark. I stopped for a minute to adjust my helmet lamp and heard a blood-curdling, spine-chilling, colly-wobbling screech from deep within the woods to my left. It went on and on, the sound of something being brutally killed and probably eaten…I remember standing there, listening for a whole minute and wishing it would stop. It was loud too – this was no owl killing a mouse (unless the mouse had a microphone and an amplifier handy), so I assumed, rather irrationally, that it was a mutant claw beast that had escaped from a top security experimental military weapons facility and the sound I could hear was an unfortunate scientist having his spine torn out.

I’ve ridden here on my own for years in the dark and I’ve not been scared once. In fact, I sneer at those who tell tales of “My first solo night ride last night, wow I’m so CRAZY!!” on Internet forums and the like. This “being scared in the woods” thing was definitely a new experience.

What did I do? I got the hell outta there, fast. No way was my spine being torn out by a mutant.