Wide Open Track Teaser

BOOM! It's done. Our new track, Wide Open, has been broken in and this sweet little teaser is ready to view.

What we are trying to do out here is build trails with a very specific idea in mind - to a brief, if you like. There have always been bike tracks here in the Algarve, Portugal, but no where nearly enough to justify running a holiday company, and certainly not of the same quality you might find in a high profile bike resort. But the potential on the mountains around Monchique is incredible. We tried building a really easy "begginer" trail the other day and it's almost impossible. Even if you look for a mellow hillside to build on, you hack away the bush, and the gnarliest granite rock features and natural berms and jumps just seem to rise up out of the ground in front of you, as if set free from the constraints of the tangled vegetation. This is why the first trail we built ended up with the name Feature Creature. That trail doesn't have more than 20m without some kind of crazy feature on it. It's a trail builders dream hillside, in every direction that you look out here.

From the outset we have been thinking about what sort of trails we would fill one ideal week of riding with. From super steep and tight, through to multi-line World Cup style race tracks, fast and gnarly flat-out, and bike park style highways of jump lines and berms. Each trail we build starts from an idea: "ok, our next rack needs to be like this...". Then we find the right sort of hill with the right sort of terrain to fit that description, toil away for a couple of months and Bobs your uncle - we have a new track.

Wide Open actually started with a name, which then had to be translated into a concept, and so the resulting trail is exactly as it says on the tin. Full throttle with big features and the kind of gnar that you can hit at high speed but still is pretty technical. We will have a World Cup rider on the track by the end of May to bang out a full length track vid. Keep watching this space, but for now, press play and enjoy...