Day 2 - Discovering Lower Silesia

The numbers alone were enough to scare us: the queen stage of the trip. The profile was completely different from day 1, a lot of climbing and a lot of descending, very little flat.

As soon as we left the hotel we rode through Kłodzko and got to see the walls of the fortress from below. We started climbing straight away and dropped into another little bit of singletrack, this time on the Singletrack Glacensis network, the big one around here: more than 200 km of trails spread across 27 loops straddling Poland and the Czech Republic. Great fun, going up and down, and we ended up climbing a forest track that took us out to a road where we got about 5 km of descent, which was perfect for resting our hands and, mainly, our backside.

Before lunch we had to get over a climb of about 4 km with 320 m of elevation on a track that every now and then opened up a view between the giant trees. For lunch we went to Raj Pstrąga and tried one of their signature dishes, fried trout. This is not just any dish around here: pstrąg kłodzki, the trout from the Kłodzko area, is on the Polish agriculture ministry's list of traditional products, and it is farmed in the cold, clean water that comes down from these mountains. The place started out as a fish farm in 1980, one of the oldest in Lower Silesia, and in 1985 they set up a fry kitchen next to the ponds: trout straight out of a pan over a wood fire, with bread. Forty years later they are still doing it exactly the same way.

After recharging we had 30 km of climbing ahead of us, the first 23 gentle but the last 7 getting harder and harder all the way to the top. We were grinding up a forest track surrounded by very dense woodland, and in some sections it even went dark. The track had everything, smoother stretches where the bike could run and rocky sections where it felt like someone was pulling you backwards and it took everything to keep the bike moving.

We reached the top (1,064 m) and did a few kilometres of up and down on almost perfect tracks, with open stretches with views and stretches with a lot of trees too. At the end of that section an incredible 20 km descent was waiting for us, the first part on a track, also in very good condition and very fast, and then on tarmac, all the way down to the bottom of the valley. We stopped in Międzygórze, at a small shop, to buy something for the last few kilometres.

At the end of the descent we got to Bystrzyca Kłodzka and we had "only" the last climb left, 7 km with 400 m of elevation, to reach the hotel. The sun had already gone down and we were completely wrecked, so we arrived at PTTK Jagodna in the dark, a mountain hut that has been open since 1895. It started out as a German mountain inn on the pass, the Passhöhe Baude, and it has changed its name every time the country changed: Brandbaude in the 1930s, Schronisko Spalona after the war and Jagodna since the late 1960s. It sits at 811 m, its dining room is in a glazed veranda and it has around 80 beds, thirty of them in a communal attic dorm. Wash the kit, shower, dinner and bed.