Pinkbike Poll: Are Trails Becoming Too Manicured?
Depending on where you live, you may or may not have noticed something happening to your local trails over the last few years: those root filled, rock littered old-school technical sections are being replaced with billiard table-smooth ribbons of brown dirt. It might be as subtle as that big, tricky root going missing from one ride to the next, or maybe it is an entire trail that has had its personality changed from singletrack that would have chewed you up if you made a mistake, to a much tamer animal that will probably just slobber on you. Of course, even though the roots and rocks may have been paved over, the new additions might consist of lines, jumps, or rhythm segments that are even burlier but require a different skill set to conquer. Regardless of whether or not these new-school trails are as challenging, there is certainly an argument to be made for remembering our roots, that we should be keeping the mountain in mountain biking, and that the answer shouldn't always be to add a berm or remove the terrain's natural properties. Or maybe I'm completely wrong and these "flow trails" are exactly what everyone is looking for. There are, of course, some very valid reasons for the de-tuning of trails, some of which are listed below, but where should the line be drawn? And, so long as we're having fun, does it matter?
![Aaron Gwin]()
![The new top section of Superberm after a serious rock removal exercise.]()
Rooty, rutty... and just right?
The Skills What is it that we're losing by allowing the trend to turn towards groomed, berm filled trails? After all, can you really argue that a flowy and manicured trail isn't fun? Hell no, but we also can't forget that we don't ride BMX bikes. We ride mountain bikes in the mountains, of all places, and our machines utilize forgiving suspension, meaty tires, and often dropper posts that allow us to tackle the worst of the worst. Is there not a sense of great accomplishment by using these incredible tools to their full potential? What about looking ahead, choosing the best line, and absolutely nailing a technical section of trail that you gave yourself a fifty-fifty chance of surviving? I fear that that train of thought might be foreign to many newer riders who are admittedly great at jumping but lack the handling skills that would let them excel on toothy monsters like Whistler's Goat's Gully or Joyride, trails that require you to actually plan out your next move. I'm not trying to convince you that playing checkers isn't fun, but there is something to be said for being a good chess player. Don't Fight Nature Our bikes are fitted with those wide tires and suspension so that we can tackle the very stuff that is being replaced by these manicured, one-line trails. With that in mind, do you not think that it is odd that smoother is now considered better? At the risk of offending a large number of sensitive people, not all trail work is good trail work, and it blows my mind that builders feel the need to rush out and fix much of the ''damage'' caused by heavy traffic or adverse weather. While completely ignoring trail maintenance is obviously not the answer, constantly fighting wear and tear can result in a bland and featureless trail that doesn't require much skill to ride properly. I say let it pour, bring on the skidders, and, in the spirit of Ol' Dirty Bastard, let's allow it to get a bit raw out there. It Should Be Hard Trails that make a proficient rider pucker up with nervousness not only encourage progression, they also serve as rarified ground that those with less skill and courage are best advised to avoid. I'm not trying to sound like an elitist a*shole here, but it is a simple fact that even a good local surfer knows that they might get killed if they tried to paddle into the behemoths at Jaws, very much like I know better than to roll into Sorge's Red Bull Rampage line. There is no law preventing anyone from doing either, and while both of those might be extreme examples for my cause, it highlights the fact that there is a place for really scary terrain, even if you wouldn't dream of riding it. Remember, your nightmare might be some freak's fantasy. Put simply, the mountain should not be tamed down to meet the needs of new riders. Yes, there should be trails catering to those who are looking for less demanding terrain, but the problem arises when the entire trail network begins to do follow that rationale. | Access Issues Although I admit to looking back somewhat fondly at those old Wild West days of un-policed trail building, a time when burly trails and stunts would pop up week after week and rider progression seemed to match that furious pace, times have changed and a different approach is now required in most locations. Volunteers are working hard to legitimize entire trail networks, thereby ensuring their existence despite jumpy land owners, logging companies, and local governments that seem to be scared of letting people have fun in the bush. The taming down of trails is often required to appease the above groups, be it replacing singletrack that took riders down a serious pitch of rocks and roots with a new section of manicured switchbacks, or the removing of a feature that isn't "up to code". Such is the price to continue to enjoy a great trail, and it is one that I would choose before losing the privilege to be able to ride the trail at all. Preventing Erosion Having killer trails is such a draw that many of us base where we live and work around them; just ask the massive contingent of expatriates that inhabit the area around Whistler, B.C.. Amazing trails likely also means a lot of trail traffic, with all of those tires putting considerable wear and tear into the singletrack, especially if it happens to rain a lot where you live. Erosion is inevitable, and keeping it at bay can be the difference between finding flow or smashing your way through ruts and braking bumps. With this in mind, trail builders will often pay careful attention to the grade of the terrain or how to drain excess rain water, and even completely reroute an existing trail if it means letting a heavily eroded section heal. The result can often be somewhat docile terrain, but it also means that the trail doesn't decay into a tangled mess of cross ruts and cheater lines. More Riders on Bikes As with any action sport, it takes a certain amount of dedication, learned skill, and maybe a sprinkling of natural talent before you feel comfortable tackling the serious goods. It can be easy to forget that fact after you've been riding for many years, and that our sport can also be intimidating for someone just starting to dip their toes into it. That section of nastiness that you air over without batting an eye might pose a serious problem for someone less familiar with both the terrain and the skills required. It's simple: Lower the Mountain Dew factor and you'll get more people out enjoying the sport, and you're likely an elitist a*shole if you think that that's a bad thing, right? More riders equals more trails, at least in theory. And more trails is a good thing, even if they might not have that level of sketchy rawness that some search out. |
The flow is easy to find on this one.
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next step for trails is to pave them with asphalt...
:P
Telling you parents that your gay...
and thats why Wiggo had a big pair of mutton chops, to let everyone know what side he was on, u cant be gay and have mutton chops its the law.
I'm a fan of building both type of trails , rake and rides right thru to smooth bermed no brainer stuff , personally I think a mixture of the two is best.
One thing that does f*ck me off though is people who try turning natural/rake and rides into smooth no brainer shit , f*ck off dude !
It Is the sport evolution , independently that we like it or not, That is what Big industries and network would.,... sad but true . It rests us only to buit and maintein our tracks as we like and think... Personally I think that the right stay in the middle.
Riders got off the road, bikes got muddy, tires got knobbier, gears got wider, terrain got gnarlier, Lycra got scarce, dudes got radder, suspension got longer, brakes got better, bikes got heavier, tires got grippier, bikes got stronger, trails got smoother, suspension got shorter, bikes got lighter, tires got narrower, wheels got bigger, Lycra makes a comeback, riders go limp. Sad.
But some days smooth just isn't enough. there's nothing like the feeling of smashing through the gnar, feeling your bike working to the limit of its design.
Both are aspects of what we all have in common: a love for mtb.
So finding flow has nothing to do with trail manicure.
Every Tom, Dick and Harry think that they know trail building and how it should be done. Well if thats the case go out and build your own trails that you like to ride and let the builders fix what needs to be fixed. Erosion is Erosion and its called trail maintenance.
I do not agree that every trail should be smooth it is mountain biking and we ride to challenge ourselves on different terrain thats what keeps us coming back. Its usually the people that just ride and dont build that complain.
Bike park trails are fun to ride really, but the people HAVE to work on it when it's not in shape anymore... exemple: I just came back from Malmedy, there are "braking holes" (?) everywhere... It's okay when there's some, that are not too big, but it's becoming dangerous...
[ ] Some hair is ok, keeping it in check is probably best
[ ] I like to get lost in a glorious, sweaty thicket.
We personally welcome new people to come and skid down, makes the tracks rougher and the braking bumps bigger. I'd rather have a rough, steep track then something smooth, otherwise whats the point in having a big bike? Surely if you want something a little more smooth and tame do some XC?
Kinda the mountain bike equivelent to how they size women's clothing for the ever growning overweight population. Labling a size 8 as a size 4.
A friend and I built the vast majority of the trails for Attitash bike park in the early/mid 2000's. As any trail builder you tend to build to your tastes and what the terrain dictates. As a result we had tight, technical, rocky, rooty, New England style trails. The mountain had a reputation for beng a tough technical place to ride. Many complained of the lack of flow but then praised the increase of trail flow every year they came back.
The funny thing was that we never changed the trails to creat the flow, the rider's skillset just increased and with skills comes flow.
great
Every newcomer in this sport probably lilkes trails with not a single root or rock in it because they just wanna go fast and just don't have the skills to ride fast in rough terrain.
Another group of riders prefers speed and gettin loose in nice shaped "highways" because they just don't like pain in the arms after a day of riding. Maybe they just wanna jump some big jumps which are mostly found on not-natrual trails.
A third group may say that a real rider must handle steep and rocky terrain.
In my opinion, the trails are way to much shaped. I like jumps with nice shaped lips but i just don't like it to see guys with their 10'000 dollar trek session 9.9 riding on a trail where everyone could ride with a dirtbike as fast as him. For me, a downhill trail has to be pretty natural, fast, with some big jumps. A Freeride trail may be more shaped, with big berms and alot of jumps, walls etc. But please stop to shape famous trails (Like Gurten in Switzerland). Where is the action with no roots?
i must admit i never liked them and prolly never will. natural, rocky, rooty trails FTW!
This is where whistler works, you have the joys of Trespasser to the flow of A-line and the no smaller corners of blue velvet.
I love the idea of trails with zones and themes, on smaller hills this is harder to achieve to get your fix of each style.
Berms are super fun, gnarr is super fun, often we feel like riding different things at different times, even different times of the day.
We have built many different trails up here, hitting all the styles in 1 day in the summer is always a great feeling.
The man made trails are all getting too man made with sustainable surfaces... read 99% bridal path, so the majority dont ride them.
Mix it up and keep it real.
This is what's wrong with mountainbiking these days, people think that once they own a bike they can ride the shit out of every trail they can find, dictate how they're changed/maintained and post them on strava for every other goober to do the same.
Shut up moaning, buy a mattock and build some trails!
You are dead right - most people bitchin simply don't bother to make their own - and i would like to bet if they went looking and found natural gnar they would end up sanitising it to make it "rideable" OR "quicker" you know who you are
This was awesome, as our skills were evolving with the trails, we were getting better the rougher the trails got. Unfortunately, now when we tried to invite new friends along none of them stuck around for longer than 1 or 2 rides, the trails were just too tough for them and they weren't having fun. Soon a lot of us moved away from the area, got cars, jobs, girlfriends etc. and the riding group got smaller and smaller as new riders just weren't using the trails anymore.
I recently got a chance to go back and ride some of those old trails, and was horrified. All the rooty, off camber slippery switchbacks are now bermed and smooth. The rugged climbs that used to be too steep for our granny rings are now mid range geared climbs. The rutted muddy singletrack is now fast and undulating like a baby rollercoaster. It was mid ride that I realised - I have said hello to at least 20 people since I started my ride. This place is now humming. People are having fun! Mountain Biking is cool again - and I have no doubt it's due to the trails being accessible for all. (Continued)
Essentially - these groomed trails are great, but don't forget the roots of the sport. Don't expect everything to be handed to you on a plate - if you don't like the trails or feel your skills aren't evolving, get out there and make your own trails! Sure they might disappear suddenly, but isn't that part of the fun of mountain biking - getting out and exploring?
So we need manicured, sustainable trails. You can't have romantic dreams of virgin trails and at the same time shout out: "let's get more people to the sport" and "DH should have more recognition in media". Consequences, consequences... I say, sport won't shrink, so we need more bike parks and more trail centers, all with machine dug trails allowing easy maintenance
Now we have a ton of beginner/intermediate "rake and ride" stuff with crappy root sections that aren't technical, they're just annoying. Many of them are there simply because the trail builders are too lazy to remove them.
It seems to me today, at least around where I live, a lot of riders are lazy. They don't want to progress, they don't want trails they have to learn to ride, they want trials that bring them to new locations at the same technical level they're used to riding. Same lame trails cut and built in different locations. Trail builders (myself included) build trails they like to ride. I'm not opposed to trails that aren't exactly my cup o' tea, infact I maintain several trails that are as far away from what "I" like as can be but are great trails and worth taking care of. But by and large I like to build technical lines. Lines that sometimes I can't ride the first time I hit them. That's the beauty of mountain biking for me is the chess aspect. I like problem solving, I like challenging myself to be a better rider.
I like riding A-line at Whistler, it's a nice change of pace and it has it's technical aspects when you're at speed, but Joyride, Crack Addict and Clown Shoes are more my tastes. I'd like to see riding like that come back to this area.
A trail out in the southwest is generally less prone to break down than a trail here in the northeast or B.C.. An extreme example would be Slickrock I suppose. That "trail" isn't going to break down much or have erosion issues. Nor are there going to be many re-routes or sterilization. But an even softer example, Porcupine Rim which is a mix of dirt and rock is a lot less work to maintian than most of the trails we have here. That sweet end section above Negro Bill Canyon down to Rt128 is almost all rock and I swear it hasn't changed hardly at all in the last 20yrs.
Our trails can get pretty flogged after a large group ride.
\
On the flips side, my GF and I recently rode a trail that she has been working hard on to clean top to bottom, to find what was a classic techie XC trail turned into something that resembles a poorly build pump track. (this was not the trail crew) She was Gutted!!! For the last 2 years she has been steadily increasing her skills/fitness, and felt that today was going be the day She would finally link it all together, and now its not even a challenge. This was not a hard trail, (blue) it needed some work to fix some muddy sections but driving an excavator down it and completely changing the character of the rails was not the answer (again my opinion) .
It will always be a tricky line to walk between maintaining a trail and changing the character of a trial. My best advice is if your worried about a favourite trail getting the buffing treatment get involved!!! go to trail days, work with people doing the maintenance
and add your 2cents. and then learn to maintain trails so that they dont get so worn out that the only option is to pave them in again.
Another problem it seems to me is that we're caught at the tipping point between the old thought process of "It's mountain biking, just ride the trail" to new thought process of "we have to make the trails sustainable, so they'll last."
My opinion is that if greater than 50% of the people can ride a 29r "dirt-roadie" hardtail on a trail (that's not billed as a beginner trail) then something needs to be added; either some jumps, transfers, technical lines. 90% of the trails near me are a what I term "a snoozefest". I frequently ride them with a flat-barred CX singlespeed bike when I want to be challenged...slightly.
But to the kids whose first experience of mountain biking was an 8" bike in the bike park: stop pushing up to do laps of Bobsled. There is an amazing variety of trails to be experienced and climbing is not the devil. The bike park is awesome, but when you can't get there why not enjoy the best of the trails where you are instead of trying to duplicate the bike park experience on Fromme?
I had a friend who had watched some GoPro footage of my day in Mammoth Mountain last year, and he was so stoked by it, he asked if he could try mountain biking with me. I of course was ecstatic, but at the same time nervous, as to my mind, these trails were just way too technical and challenging for a beginner and I feared he would be frustrated and and annoyed rather than enjoying it. Luckily he was fit and though challenged, he loved it and by the 3rd ride on my wifes bike had ordered himself a Canyon Nerve...(continued)
Fookin had to write that in 3 parts.. stoopid!
Easy trails are all fun and good, until they come at the expense of the harder trails. At that point proponents of them can go pound sand because it steals away from the people who put them there in the first place.
My moto is "Let the one who ate shit cast the first stone".
These days I like to ride fast and flowy with lots of interesting technical features. I still love steeps and big rocks but I'm definitely over pointless ladder bridges. Maybe it's because I've already proven to myself that I can ride those (and big dorps to falt) so now I can just focus on simpler pleasures.
Times change. We've gone about as smooth as we can go and we've accepted that fall-line trails aren't sustainable. Maybe our tastes will change again? Or maybe some new technical evolution will happen to have us favour some new trail style. Who knows? Let's maintain a variety of trail types and ride more.
P.S. No dig - No whine about any trail
I'm told these rhythm/pump sections and over use of berms are to add flow. If you cant make a trail thats obviously been loved and ridden by many for years flow then there is no hope for you. Sod off and go play at the bmx pump track instead!
But I can see why you want a dirt jump track like this... but I never want a DH track like this, I want the rough stuff that my bikes are designed for
For me, it comes down to what people want. There is obviously a demand for smoothed out trails with 'flow' otherwise trail builders wouldn't build them.
Furthermore, trying to maintain a technical trail (exposed roots, loose rocks, uneven surfaces, etc.) if far more difficult if the trail is owned by a corporation (e.g. Whistler) or landowner who has responsibilities (e.g. Forestry Commission).
Also, mountain biking has become more popular over the last few years and in the UK at least, the little technical gems have been ridden flat by the frequency of tyre traffic.
Good topic.
Where I live in Spain we do not have those kind of trails. We have some jumps, and some berms where almost necessary, but most of it is mostly natural, how the pass of time and tyres have had trails evolve. And to be honest I preferr it. It's surely not as fast as those super flowy smooth hard packed trails and you don't spend half of the time airbound, but to me they're the most fun.
I swear to god pinkbike likes to just create bullshit out of nothing. Just recently they asked "Should 27.5" wheels be banned from DH?" Honestly who gives a f*ck. It's personal freaking choice... why are these debates even surfacing?
I love flow... I love gnar-tech. Depends on the f*cking day of the week!
All of it has it place as long as you don't sanitise the natural technical to obtain the flowy man manmade.
Green, Blue, Red or Black: Use the headings properly, know your limits, have fun and don't go crying to mummy when it hurts because you bit off more than you can chew.
The (orange) DH track is something else though - and def my favourite.
If the DH was the only track there, the majority would not be able to ride it.
The smoother red routes open up the sport to many more riders/machines, and are still great fun for a blast down on whatever bike you are on.
Horses for courses I suppose -- but smoothing-out a full on DH track is just sacrilege!!!!
I'm not an expert rider and never will be, don't have the time, some of us have jobs. I do ride a lot of intermediate and enjoy the rocks and roots as well easier trail on off days when i still want to ride. Most riders don't have land available to just go out and build their own trails. We can barely get the parks around here to even allow trails. The last thing we need is to build stuff that requires extreme maintenance, increases injuries and requires rescues when the park staff is already stretched to it's limit as it is and was hesitant to allow any mountain biking at all. The options are simply few and far between around here and trail mileage is limited, not an endless supply of possibilities for everyone to just build and build and build. But who cares right? As long as you get yours it's all good.
We have both here in the alps but I still find there is more and more flowy stuff : not good imo !! There was one track last year in les gets that had a quite few roots and it was pretty rough (awesome !). This year, went back with a friend and all the roots have disappeared; what happened ?
If there is a steep section you don't like than you don't build a easy way and wreak the trail.
I think trail changes like this can be ok but under a few conditions;
1.The new line must be slower than the A-line
2. It must not be in the way of the A-line
3.It cannot become the new A-line.
To often riders have trouble with something so change the track instead of the way they adapt to the section.
Valid points. This is a multifaceted issue that is so specific to each riding area. Land managers, other user groups (dirt bike, hikers, atv, etc), terrain, trail traffic, riding styles all shape trails for better or worse. Sometimes change has to happen, builders can never please or appeal to all riding styles, especially in regards to old trails turned new. There is a significant difference when looking at new trails, when this may not apply as riders has no concept of "what once was". I wouldn't say flow is limited to berms or manicured trails, its in most properly designed or well built trails, if you know your lines. A trail can definitely be built with more "natural" features, address all of the above issues, and still have a shit load of flow, it just takes a really talented, experienced builder to accomplish this.
Mostly I bought it for the fit, I couldn't care less about the minutiae of the handling. Since I'm 15% bigger than the average person I want a bike that's 15% bigger as well.
Mainly because you can really hurt yourself on a loose rock.
Rough as guts all the way.
Why do we give these cheese dicks anymore platform to complain from in mountain biking than they get in the rest of the world?
[ ] YES
[ ] NO
[X] TAKE THEM AWAY BEFORE I STAB SOMEONE.
Comparison: Smooths trails are way f*ckin funner and you can always build berms errywhere
Rocky ruttty technical trails are good things to ride for good balance and overall bike control