Trailside Triage!

So, my first attempt at a Blog post and it involves Crashes, Blood and Air Ambulances! Good times indeed!
Barry and I headed off up to Golspie Wildcat trail centre, located in Golspie, Sutherland, around 50 miles North of Inverness, http://www.highlandwildcat.com for a Sunday morning run. Our friend Scott was too rough from the previous nights drinking to make it so he had cancelled on us leaving just the two of us to head on up and hit the trail!

We arrived at the car park in Golspie around 11am and as soon as I had switched the engine off, Barry put his head in his hands as he realisised he had forgotten his SPD shoes! D'oh!!!
Fortunately, he uses pedals which have a cage around them so you can kind of use them without the clipless shoes, however, they are not ideal when you are wearing running trainers!!
Anyway - we weren't going to push it too much today, given that Barry took his rather expensive D-SLR camera with him.
We decided to just mess around with the camera, Barry would take the pictures and I would be the subject matter, sessioning some technical sections and looking for some impressive angles to capture.

All was good and we were heading on up the hill to the most challenging section called the, "Lactic Ladder", which is a short, steep section of the course graded black (extreme difficulty) where you are challenged to negotiate some large rocks of different shapes and sizes, all positioned in a climbing format so you are moving around on the bike in all different positions to keep body weight in the right place!

After we reached the top, we swapped bikes and I had a brief shot on Barrys' Santa-Cruz Blur. I must admit, the feeling of the full sus bouncy bouncy took some getting used to, however I was impressed with the lack of pedal bob even with theRP-23 Fox Float shock on lock out! For being an all mountain bike it climbed nicely and accelerated up the hill to the top of Ben Bhraggie without much effort. Going back to the Spesh with the hard tail rear was certainly noticable on the descent, for all we managed to get done!

After a brief stop up the top of the hill, we had caught our breath and took in the scenery, it was time to drop the saddles on the bikes and head off down the hill for the bit we had been looking forward to!

Off we went hitting the first couple of berms at good pace we began the drop to sea level. The Wildcat trails boast the UK's longest singletrack descent, 1300ft of sheer DH pleasure!

We made it about 3/4 of a mile down the hill when I noticed a fellow biker in standing in the middle of the trail waving his arms around.
Slowing up we noticed that there was another guy lying on the ground holding his leg just below his knee.

Being first to arrive on scene, I asked if everything was ok are they needing help to which I got the reply, "My friend has cut his leg open." Asking if it was broken or if they had a 1st aid kit, I recieved the response no they didn't have a kit and it wasn't broken. It was however, burst open 4" long, by 2" wide by about 2" deep. You could see all the muscle and fatty tissues of his leg. It was practically down to the bone and looked pretty nasty! Suffice to say, this boy wasn't getting off the hill under his own steam!

Hi friend, Mark had already phoned 999 and the Air Ambulance was on its way, ETA was 10 minutes from Inverness.
The boy had no bandage over his gaping wound and was only covering it lightly with his hand to prevent flies and midges getting into it. Barry got the 1st aid kit out and we proceeded to bandage it up and apply some pressure to prevent further bleeding. You could tell this lad was in pain but he was looking on the bright side, at least he's getting a helicopter ride!

Once the chopper had landed he quickly got taken away to Raigmore Hospital, back in Inverness to get patched up. We were then left with 3 bikers and 4 bikes. Barry volunteered to take Mark's friends bike down the hill as he didn't have the SPD's he wasn't keen on the rest of the trail. I took the other guy down the track, hitting every jump and drop off as I could find. Poor Mark struggled to keep up, but I don't blame him! No doubt his confidence was knocked considering his mate had just had a hole torn in his leg! We eventually made it down to the bottom of the course and got the bikes packed up and headed off home. Good deed done for the day and feeling quite chuffed with ourselves!