Park Rash may sound like that nasty skin condition Bankstone News picked up a while back after spending (perhaps in retrospect) a little too much time with the daytime drinking crowd down at Stragpipes Memorial Gardens. But it isn’t.
In fact (the sole currency, as regular readers will be well aware, in which we deal here at Bankstone News), Park Rash is another of those steep bits of road we keep talking about (see previous issues) that may or may not find its way onto the final route for this year’s monkeybike-based Charity fundraising event, Mountain Monkeys.
Montain Monkeys, as you may already be aware based on your pre-perusal of previous editions of this weekly e-magazine, takes place on the weekend of 4th and 5ft July and involves a motley selection of persons touring the steepest hill climbs in all Yorkshire in a vague kind of homage to popular pedal cycle contest, the Tour de Yorkshire.
Sure, Park Rash, situated above the charming hamlet of Kettlechip in the Warpdale Valley, has a funny sounding name; but no funnier than some of the other brutal hill climbs of which we will be speaking in future editions of Bankstone News, which have names like Oxknob Scar, The Stang and Butterbutts Pass.
What matters, for the purposes of Mountain Monkeys, is that it is b) extremely steep and a) in Yorkshire. Both of which boxes it most certainly ticks, being a) (as previously mentioned) in Yorkshire (we’ve checked) and b) sufficiently gradientitudinous to ascend more than 300m in less than 2km, before plunging down an almost equally steep hill towards Middleham.
About Mountain Monkeys
Apart from having a bit of what might very loosely be termed ‘fun’, the central purpose of this year’s MM event is to raise money for that most excellent of causes, the Yorkshire Air Ambulanciers (YAA). As regular viewers of TV docu-soap Helicopter Heroes will know, the brave men and women of YAA perform a service that is quite literally lifesaving, but also one that is, quite frankly, not cheap.
Keeping both its helicopter ambulances (or ‘ambulopters’ as they are known) in the air costs £3.6m a year, or (very nearly) £10k a day. Consequently, with no public funding, they need all the help they can get. Down the years, Bankstone and friends have provided a huge amount of support to the YAA, most of it, sadly, of moral variety.
This year, however, we are determined to outdo all previous efforts and to raise at least enough money to keep one or other of their choppers in the air for an hour or two, and YOU can help us do it. Yes, YOU! The best way you can do this is to come along and ride a monkey bike with us and get some sponsorship for doing so.
To find out how, contact event organiser in chief Daikon Tokyo by clicking on his surname and sending him an email. Alternatively simply send us a vast sum of money and some brief words of encouragement via Just Giving (see below left, although perhaps wait until we’ve got round to changing the name from Medieval Monkeys, as we will shortly be doing).
Click to see some wobbly GoPro footage
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