I'm writing this at the dining table of The Logs, a big wooden house just outside Fort William. I'm up here with TLMH, Bruce, Clive, Carmel, Matt, Chalky, Kate, Michael and Michael's friend Kirsten. The ground's white, the pile of empty beer cans is getting bigger and it's six degrees warmer inside the fridge than it is outside the front door. Everyone except me, Michael and Kirsten has gone for a suicidal ascent of some mountain or other.

I've spent the whole week reminding Bruce of the avalanche risk and calculating his chances of survival on each day. Although I had a day on the hill on Monday most of the time I've been out on my bike.

Chalky, Michael and I had a stunning day yesterday biking the Witch's Trails in Leanachan Forest, which is conveniently just over the road from the house. I think the trails are pretty new - we've biked around Leanachan a lot in the past and never noticed them before. They're graded similarly to ski trails: green for mincing lemons who don't want to chip their nail varnish, blue for the adventurous but scared, red for real men and black for unhinged would-be kamikazists. We spent most of our time on the reds, although Chalky - who fancies himself a bit of a ninja - had a go at a black run. He bottled out halfway down. Still, we've found a great camera angle for taking shots to make it look like we're shooting out the bottom of Nessie, the most dangerous of the blacks. As style is just so much more important than substance in this game, we'll be taking advantage of this today.

Most of the red runs were very cool indeed, with great mixed ground and quite a few thrills. I managed to avoid the spills, which is lucky, because as usual I was clipped into my SPD pedals. You get a lot more power and control if you're clipped in, the only downside being that if you fly over the handlebars the back end of the bike follows you and lands on your head. One of the particular hazards of the trails is that many of the routes have sections of raised duckboard a foot or two above the ground. Chalks took a great nosedive off one of these but recovered quickly. If it had been me there'd have been a complete wipeout.

Still, I'm turning into a better biker than I once was. Today, Chalks is out climbing some big hill in nothing but a thong and a pair of flip-flops to prove what a hard man he is, so Michael and I are off to explore the Witch again. Toil and trouble, especially on the uphill sections, but great fun all the same.