This fall, Ride Creations (Nico Vink and Kristof Lenssens) and Shaperideshoot (Gaëtan Rey) teamed up to refresh a couple of trails for Bikepark Châtel. The aim was to add more jumps and flow to existing trails, giving a lot of care to water management, and to improve accessibility for beginners. In fact, the trails have been rebuilt from top to bottom. Nico Vink started the project already this summer with a fresh section of the Blues and Rock and we're super excited for you to see the work we've been doing on the other trails when the bike park reopens in 2017.
New jump line in the Serpentine. The goal was to add a lot of air in this track well known for its 65 turns.
Another angle of the new jump section. Two different levels of jump lines, with transfers everywhere. Let's work your creativity there.
Spent a bit of time on this bit of track that used to go uphill. No more pedaling....
Another shot of the whoops.
Huge berms built by Nico and Kristof in the upper section of the Chatellane.
Kristof smoothing out some turns in the Chatellane.
Bucket view of Nico Vink in his 14 tonne. Quite a big bit of machinery, but really needed to move quickly a lot of dirt. Just a bit scary when it gets steep...
The whole team. From let to right, Kristof Lenssens, Nico Vink and Gaëtan Rey.
Gaëtan Rey in his digger. Sometimes you feel a bit lonely after 11 hours working on your own in the forest but this 8 tonne Hitachi is a really good friend.
Dirt waves in the Serpentine.
Fresh turns after the road gap in the Chatellane. By the way, the skinny canyon that used to be your landing is no longer there.
Sometimes you need smaller tools.
Shark fin in the Serpentine.
Followed by a new table top.
The line of the Serpentine has been changed a bit here, cutting out the uphill and replacing it with some jumps. Table top to roller to step up.
More than 20 jumps have been added to this trail, and there's still one week of work to go.
Nico and Kristof worked a lot on the road gap section in the Chatellane.
We're just missing something next to it so you can appreciate the true size of this jump. You can get up to 18 meters of air on this table top!
Kristof, super focused, working his magic.
Braking bumps in Les Gets are ridiculous .
They were building that trail when i went earlier in the year, and only 3 trails were open in Chatel,and they were a joke
It's not News Trail. It's just évolution of known Trail.
The runs look like they have been used by the French Military for mortar shell practice. Literally destroyed.
Two guys with hand tools are not going to make any sort of dent to the sustained damage the trails get, every day. That said, it's more than we saw in Morzine & Les Gets. Some truely terrible examples of trail building there. Same old crap for the last 10+ years.
Not even playing the same sport, let alone game as the likes of Whistler.
I love more natural stuff with rocks, roots etc too compared to the motorway style trails, but when everything, corners, straights etc are riddled with what looks like a staircase, it's really not any fun to ride at all.
Who is with me?
As has been already stated, the maintenance in chatel is pretty nonexistent these days, back in '10-11 crew would just close down fluid or even serpentine in the middle of the season and fix stuff, nowadays they just close black runs after 3 drops of rain...
Went to ride Champer dh on the 18. Aug and big part of middle section was just rebuild with the traffic there being 50x smaller compared to chatel.
Same with Zore-Supermorzine, berms were like autobahn in the middle of August... Then there was this brakebump garden just before Zore lift but we can consider it a feature because major part of trails were is such good shape haha.