A partial credit of this picture has to go to a Canadian photographer named Reuben Krabbe whose film about taking on polar bears, adverse weather and melting sea ice to capture a group of extreme skiers in front of a total lunar eclipse high up in Arctic Norway. I saw this at the Banff Film Festival (in Porthcawl - not Canada), but this sowed the seed of an idea in my head. So one night in West Wales before it got dark, my inner voice said to me “right, tomorrow morning you‘re going to ride to that distant rocky outcrop called Garn Fawr on the horizon and take a self-portrait of you and your bike against the morning sky”. I had just bought a Fujinon XF 100-400mm zoom lens and was keen to put it to good use, so before retiring to bed, I diligently set up a tripod trained on the top of Mynydd Dinas ready for the following day.
I woke before my alarm at 0530 and peering out of the window, was dismayed to see the landscape shrouded in a thick sea mist. To make matters worse, a last minute check on the camera setup led to me to clumsily stumble over one of the tripod legs fatally undoing all my careful alignment of the night before. If I was going to get the shot I wanted - which included the sun being northeast of my planned position on the rock, I couldn‘t delay so set off on my Santa Cruz 29’er hardtail mountain bike. The first part of the ride was a steep descent down to sea level where the chilly single figure dawn temperatures from the Gwaun Valley erased any remaining sleepiness. After that, the terrain was typically North Pembrokeshire: long, steep climbs and seemingly little respite on downhills. The real work started in Dinas Cross where I turned off the A487 immediately into a long 20% climb called Spring Hill. Once the lane levelled out, I noticed the mist was starting to lift, giving rise to sunshine and fast moving storm clouds and I could see the sea - things were looking good.
There’s a whitewashed standing stone just before the turning off the lane to Mynydd Dinas where I was momentarily distracted by a 6-foot long roll of carpet that I swear had a pair of black city shoes protruding from one end, but I didn‘t stop. The off-road section toward the first rocky outcrop of Carn Enoch was easy sheep trails and after skirting around this crag that’s a popular bouldering spot for climbers, I could see my destination - Garn Fawr ahead. When I arrived, it was a lot steeper and bigger than I‘d imagined and climbing with the bike was not that easy. At about the steepest point with the least solid handholds, my mobile phone started to vibrate in my pocket. It was my wife who‘d just woken up asking if I was doing that photo thing and telling me that her phone was almost dead. I said I‘d call back and eventually made it onto the top of the rock where a sudden and strong gust of wind almost caught me off balance.