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Being a photographer can be a blessing or a curse. I’ve ‘wasted’ literally countless hours waiting for the weather to clear, or the light to ‘pop’, shivering on cold, uncomfortable mountainsides as my riders’ patience is tested and friendships strained… sometimes heading home with nothing in the can. And then at other times nature’s magic happens to unveil unimaginable beauty – as it did here in Torridon. The notoriety of Torridon’s nadge-tech trails had always put this place on my bucket list to ride, but I hadn’t counted on the gob-smacking beauty that lies in wait when its weather gods play ball. After a couple of hours of sogginess, in just a few minutes a lifetime of waiting and shivering was paid back, a dozen times over. Damn, I love being a photographer.

THE COVERS

Where to start? With a year of issues and over 1,000 pages of editorial there’s a lot to try and sum up, so it’s best to start at the start with the images that won readers over, and turned heads on the shelves of John Menzies (young’uns, it was a real shop where people bought magazines). Issue one famously featured a helmet-less rider with finger-less mitts, clutching onto his bar-ends for dear life with a look of do-or-die on his screaming face. Probably not the greatest cover of all time, we’ll be honest, but the idea was to communicate the pure thrill of mountain biking and show readers we really got it. Incidentally, bikes that didn’t sport bar-ends were marked down in the tested section, which we’ll get to later. By the fourth issue those covers had settled down a little – July had two riders pulling decent shapes and some speed blur, although it would be several years before you could guarantee helmets. Or fully-focused images.