Mountain biking in Wageningen district
Mountain biking in Wageningen district |
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| If you think the
Netherlands is just cities like Amsteram and flat polders
filled with tulips, think again. In the East of the
Netherlands there are huge areas of sandy woodlands. If
you cycle north of Wageningen for just ten minutes you are
in the woods, and you can then cycle, off-road, for hours,
with large areas of forest, heathland and inland dunes.
You are in the Veluwe, an area popular with Dutch
tourists, but little-known outside the Netherlands. For
much of the area there are few restrictions on where you
can go. You do not have to stick to waymarked tracks
(although they do exist if you prefer that). There are
restrictions in 2 areas near Wageningen, south of Wolfheze
(where there are vulnerable areas with rare plants and
animals) and the Utrechtse Heuvelrug (the moraine area
west of Veenedaal and North of Rhenen), where mountain
bikers are restricted to the official routes apparently
because of the high recreative pressure on the area. |
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4-2-2012 Winter Until a week or so ago it was still autumn.Wet and not too cold. But this week, winter has arrived with a vengance. Last night was the coldest in nearly 30 years and when I went to the shops this morning it was -16 degrees C (and the local tour club sensibly cancelled the last winter tour). However, in the afternoon it had warmed up to 'only' - 5, and the sun was shining. Out in the woods it was spectacular with fresh snow, blue skies and sunshine. The only problem was the cold. No ice in the woods. And we saw lots of footprints of rabbits and deer, which was nice. There was only one disadvantage. We got back to learn that we had just missed the spectacle of a sparrowhawk devouring a sparrow in our back garden. The cold weather has meant that the birds have been flocking to our feeders, and on this occassion the bird of prey was apparently also hungry enough to venture into the suburbs. |
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21-01-2012 Veluwe
Challenge My goodness, what a lot of mud! The 'Wielervereneging Ede' (Ede cycling club) organised the 'Veluwe Challenge', with routes of 30, 50 and 70 kms. It had been raining pretty steadily the last week or so and there were incredible quantities of wet slippery mud. That meant it was a lot of hard work, so very tiring, and especially going uphill sometime your wheel just spun round. Especially in the first half (of the 50 km route) quite a few people (myself included) had to walk up some hills. And talking of people, the strong winds and plentiful rain did not seem to put anyone off, apparently there were an incredible 792 paticipants. All in all a great tour, well organised, and with the conditions we had today certainly a challenge. Here is a report in Dutch. |
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15-01-2012
Sustainable mountainbiking. Whereas cycling to work is super-good for the environment, mountain biking can have a more negative impact. If you had a new-year's resolution to be more sustainabile/environmentally conscious/green tthe coming 12 months, here are some tips to help:
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6-1-2012 Hoenderloo The north side of the Veluwe is, if anything, even more beautiful than the southern edge near to Wagenignen. It is just a bit more hilly, so that following the official route starting at Hoenderloo of 25 km you have about 25 m of elevation (quite a lot for round here!). Parts of it were quite tough going, firstly because a forestry machine had been along the track for a few hundred meters leaving behind a sort of quicksand to a depth of 30 cm or so. Secondly, there was quite a storm, so especially through the heathland, the headwind was so strong (and cold!) that, together with the sandy track, it was quite a fight. And finally, no longer had we left the heathland than my tyre split open, leaving the inner tube bulging throught in a baloon-like blob. Fortunately I was able to make a temporary patch with the inner bag of my saddle bag which was good enough to get me to within 50 m of the car before it finally burst. |
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25-12-2011 Christmas bike Nothing says a 'Christmas' like a new (moutain) bike! Maybe not the most theologically correct statement, but you cannot deny the truth of it. My daughter Suzanne is nearly 12 now, which seeing she is Dutch, means that she is already as tall as many adult women in many countries. So her first real mountainbike which was so large for her not so many years ago is now far too small, and it was definately time for a new one. Thanks to the LBS for their help in finding a good one! |
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27-11-2011 New bridge for
cyclists Wageningen has the Veluwe to to the north and east and the Utrechtse Heuveulrug (morraine) to the west.The area in between is called the Binnenveld, and it is an area of open fields, most of which are farmed, and a few of them are nature, including birds, orchids and rare mosses. A small river called the Grift runs down the centre of the valley (oddly enough, flowing north, away from the Rhine). A new bridge has been built across the river, connecting the cycle paths (here). Some conservationists opposed building this bridge as they think the increased numbers of cyclists will be hardful to the birdlife, but on the other hand one of biggest problems in the Binnenveld are all the cars which illegally go down the small roads, and an increased number of bikes may help against that. |
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12-11-2011 Winter
Tour Number One The Tour Club Wageningen organises 3 mountain bike tours every winter for non-members and the first this year was today.The weather was perfect; cool without being cold, sunny, and dry without the ground being too loose. Their website said there was a choice of 30 and 50 kms, but in fact the longer route turned out to be 60 km. It was an excellent route, along many of my favourate tracks, and even better I discovered a couple of new ones. The photo on the left is going acrosss the Ginkelse Heide (heath), and instead of taking the way I normally do they cut across with a nice (and long) singletrack across the heath, ending in an incredible twisting and difficult bit through a sort of sunken passgeway (bomb craters, quarries?). So many people turned up* (or went the longer route) that by the time I got to the second break they had run out of coffee and soup, and indeed there were a lot of people around. Cycling through the woods you have impression there are only a few, but when I got to a level crossing and had to wait a minute for a train there were soon something like 50 people waiting with me. And on top of everything well organised and good signposting. *520 - for more details (in Dutch) and photos see the club website |
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6-11-2011 November flowers The mountain bike route over the Sallandse Heuvelrug has a number of features in its favour. One is that it starts close to where some friends of ours live. Another is that it has some of the best quality heathland in the country. The flowers on the left are not the more common bilberry (which has purple fruit) but the cowberry (which as well as red berries has evergreen leves). It is of course typical of our warm autumn that they are still flowering now, when they 'ought' to have finished last month. There are also all sorts of other rare birds and plants living there. The disadvantage of that, for the mountainbiker is that this means that a lot of the area is protected and that you can only cycle along the official route. That also means that the tracks near to car parks for walkers are very busy with dogs, push, chairs, people spread out all over the path, etc. Definately a route to be prefered in some nice rainy weather to scare off the crowds. Although some of the route is along straight cycle paths, there are some nice stretches of singletrack and it does include 280 of elevation. |
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31-10-2011 Oirschot The official route at Oirschot consists of 2 loops. As I had my 11-year old daughter with me, we intended to do just one of them, which would have been a bit over 20 km. However at the branch we headed off in the wrong direction, and ended up doing over 30 km (although the last few we headed straight back for the car along tarmac). But we made it and, despite 2 punctures along the way, Suzanne was not even too exhausted by the time we got back to the car. It helped that the route was as flat as a proverbial pancake. Although it was flat, that did not mean it was boring. It had long stretches of bendy singletrack and wound its way through a landscape of sandy heathland, mixed forest and fen pools (left). The shore was full of interesting mosses, which looked worth investigating on a different occassion. All in all, a well worthwhile track. |
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 Photo above by Suzanne Spink |
| 9-10-2011 Winter
boots You would think that given that we get reasonably wet winters here, the local bike shops would have a good selection of good waterproof mountain bike boots for in the winter. But strangely enough that does not seem to be the case. My local shop offered to order a pair from Shimano from me, but given that Shimano boots are usually a bit tight on me I was not so keen. I suppose there is just not the demand. All it takes is a bit of foul weather and I have the woods completely to myself. There are enough days when it is dry if you do not like getting wet. It is another story in England. There is about twice the rainfall as here (depending where you are) so when I was making a family vist to Yorkshire a few weeks ago I was fairly sure to find something. And sure enough, the friendly people at Boneshakers in Harrogate were able to help me. At first I was not so sure beause I had been thinking of a more walking boot-like sole, but in practice I do not normally have to walk long distances with the bike, so decided that was not an issue and bought the Northwave Celsius boots that you can see above. Before today I had established that they were comfortable, but it was raining quite a lot last week, the ground water is high, and the woods are full of puddles. So this morning when I came across water-filled ruts and other puddles like in the photo above, I made sure that I did not skirt around them but went right through the middle. So how did they do? The boots claim to be waterproof, and indeed if you go reasonably slowly and it is not too deep (not deeper than my ankles), that seems to be the case. Anyway, with big puddles like that it is not an idea to go so fast as you cannot see what holes, logs, etc are lurking hidden beneath the surface. Having established that, I then had a good excuse to have some more fun and also went a high speed through deeper water. Of course there is no avoiding that when you do that the water splashes over the tops and you get water inside the boots. But they still did a good job, my feet were very quickly warm again and the gortex did what it is supposed to in terms of passing the moisture outside really quickly. I guess in cold weather (it was about 10 degrees today) I would be a bit less carefree in spashing through puddles and filling them up with water, but aside from that I have to say that I am very happy with them. |
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1-10-2011 Concrete
Jungle One of the nice things about living in Wageningen is that the large area of woodland to the north of us has a network of cycle paths runing through so that even without a mountain bike you can go cycling in the woods. The province is busy spending €20 million (as an aside, does the fact that Americans speak of tax dollars and the Dutch of tax cents (belastingcenten) have any significance?) making new paths (which is good) and upgrading the current paths. I am less impressed with the upgrade. What used to be a nice path made out of shells snaking through the woods from Wageningen to the pancake house, has been transformed to a 2 m wide concrete strip. It is ugly (but maybe will mellow), and has hard edges (to slip off when the soil next to it gets eroded). The province thinks it will be more resistant to damage from tree roots than its predecessor. That may be so for the asphalt sections they are "upgrading" but I doubt it for concrete. Condensation will form underneath it, and the tree roots will go searching for the water and break it open. |
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11-09-2011
Sandy Hills The slope on the left does not look much, and it is in fact only 12% gradient (still more than most hills round here), but it is in fact exceptionally difficult to cycle up. The surface is very loose sand, interrupted by roots at a variety of angles. That means that getting up in one go is vitually impossible, and even if I have to stop a couple of times on the way up to reorient myself as the back wheel spins, I still feel quite proud of myself for getting to the top. The hill is a glacial morraine (big heap of stones dumped by a glacier), with the slope cut by the river Rhine. It is only a couple of hundred metes long, but you can go up and down the morriane a number of time as you work your way along from West to East. Be careful on the downhills, as you can unexectedly come across trees placed across the tracks. The location of the slope is shown as a waypoint on the GPS track. |
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14-9-2010 Heather WeekLast week it was 'Heideweek' (heather week) in Ede, complete with parade, the heather queen and so on, and so the heather is flowering magnificantly. Nice bullfinch on the heathland as well. |
| Map |
Route |
GPX
file (right-click; save as) |
Notes |
| 1 |
Winter route from the
Wagenignen Tour Club |
WTC Tour.gpx |
52 km along one of the
tours organised by the Wageningen Tour club in November
2009, mostly in woodland. |
| 2 |
Wageningen Rondje |
Wageningen Rondje.gpx | One hour circuit round
Wageningen (14 km), ideal for a summer evening |
| 3 |
Wageningen Eng |
eng.gpx |
Quick circuit next to
Wageningen (10 km, roads) |
| 4 |
Renkum |
Renum.gpx |
From Wageningen to
Renkum, Doorwerth, Wolfheze and back through the woods at
Oostereng. 37 km. |
| 5 |
Doorwerth &
Renkumsebeekdaal |
Doorwerth.gpx |
To Doorwerth and back
via Renkumsebeekdaal. 25 km. |
| 5b |
Doorwerth (alternative
route) |
Doorwerth2.gpx |
Longer (35 km) variant
of the above route. |
| 6 |
Renkumsebeekdaal |
beekdal.gpx |
One hour circuit in
the Renkumsebeekdal (15 km) |
| 7 |
Sysselt and
Gikelseheide |
Sysselt.gpx |
30 km; through the
woods to the Ginkelse Heide (heath) and back through the
Sysselt woodland. |
| Route |
GPX File (right-click; save as) | Notes |
More information (Dutch) |
| Rheden (Posbank) |
Posbank.gpx |
The best route in the
locality, 52 km with varied terrein in woodland and
heathland and quite some differences in height. The gpx
file here is from the nearest starting point to
Wageningen; other starting points can be found from on mtbroutes.nl.
Note that you need to buy a permit. You can get it from
the Natuurmonumentum visitors'
center. |
mtbroutes.nl |
| Oosterbeek |
Oosterbeek.gpx |
You can start cycling
from Wageniningen. The route is 36 km with a possiblity to
cut it short. To reach the start from Wageningen you can
best go through the woods by Oranje Nassau Oord, go along
the road past the paper factory by Renkum, then over the
floodplain to join the route. |
mtbroutes.nl |
| Veenendaal |
Veenendaal.gpx |
Very short route (1.2
km), However can be combined with other nearby sites. |
mtbroutes.nl |
| Nijmegen |
Red route Green route Red and green |
The green route is 18
km and the red route is 24 km. They are joined at 2 points
to give a total length of 43 km. This route is number 3 in
the top 10 routes from the Netherlands. |
mtbroutes.nl |
| Amerongen |
Amerongen.gpx |
14.5 + 7 km. Entirely
in forest, mostly conifers and reasonably hilly. Note that
if you do not stay on the route, you risk getting a fine! |
mtbroutes.nl |
| Ede |
Ede.gpx |
39 Km in woodland and
heathland. Part of the route can easily be combined with other routes starting from
Wageningnen. |
mtbroutes.nl |
| Hoenderloo |
Hoenderloo.gpx |
23 km in woodland and
some heathland. Typical Veluwe with small hills and,
sandy woodland. Off the top of the map below, but
only 1/2 hour drive from Wageningen. Note
that the GPS track is different from the paths indicated
with the international MTB signs there. |
mtbroutes.nl |
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