Blokes Blog Take Over

#newzealand #mountainbike

This is my Mountain bike technical trail note, sorry if you are not a bike geek…

I just wanted a quick chat about trail building and grading here in NZ – it is on a very different basis to Europe. The vast majority is built by riders without any Forestry Commission overlords insisting on issuing Guidance, rules or silly “health and safety” pamphlets or having “insurance requirements” that prevent or stifle creativity. In NZ everyone knows MTB is a dangerous sport and is played at your own risk. It’s awesome!!

Apparently the Kennett Brothers put together a trail grading system to suit NZ, it applies to on and off road trails in a parallel fashion. So you can have a black grade Road section and a green grade off-road section leading off it. You can see the guidance on http://www.nzcycletrail.com in theory the off road trails are graded:

Green 1 or 2 “easy” in NZ. can be more like an old school welsh Red grade. That means potentially, some exposure, some roots, some off camber “not very steep” i.e 100 vertical meters over 1km in a climb. Also: Should be dual track, mostly isn’t. (I dreaded meeting someone coming at me in the opposite direction on these trails when there is barely room for me! It finally happened today but fortunately with a couple of runners at a wide section of the grade 3 trail : chief blogger)

Blue trails: 3 is intermediate, 4 is “advanced”. Of what I’ve seen so far this can include: river crossings, doubles and drops. features like slabs, seesaw, northshore of 30cm wide, tunnels, huck to flat ramps, blind drops, chutes, huge exposure. And a raw, 2ft diameter fallen tree trunk, 5m long, to cross a 3m deep ditch – on a grade 3 trail.

This is a grade 3.

So is this

This is some grade 4, you are looking in the intended direction of travel, NB pedals do not go around in the rut to the right of the steps.

Nice bit of “huck to flat” on a grade 4 (Note the Kiwi approach to armour and gloves “it’s just too bloody hot for all that crap”)

Black trails, grade 5: You might get anything (or nothing) or a combination of the following : Doubles of any size, loose surface, crazy steeps, extreme exposure, super narrow trail, skinny northshore, “no-holds-barred” you get the general idea. Like “50 shades of black” (a rocky, scary, black trail at Bike Park Wales, for those of you who have no idea what he is talking about :chief blogger) (minus the professional medical support and always much, much steeper).

This is a level easier section of grade 5: you can see where a bar end scraped the wall, trust me, the tyre was on the very edge of the trail.

I’ve ridden a few black trails at Nelson, they were pretty strong stuff maybe EWS level, without the professional overview to decide what is cool /uncool on a trail. Typical: 29% average slope over 400m vertical decending with technical features included. Not redbull rampage, but firmly in to the very top tier of MTB enthusiasts who can make a good fist of riding it. It almost always needs a couple of runs (for me) to link the features and join up the jumps. There are basically no limits on what the trail builder can include.

There is no grade 6 trail. I refer you to the previous sentence.

Every local trail builder has a view on what is intermediate or advanced and what is a technical feature and even they are often inconsistent on their own trails, lol. The trails always seem to be changing, with no notification or warning – a green trail I rode in January now has grown three doubles on it in the 11months I’ve been away!! A black trail that rode fine in January didn’t appear to have had any traffic or maintenence since and was more of a challenge to dodge the hanging foliage. The buzz from riding these trails fast and blind is amazing. In Europe there are accurate trail notes on trailforks, teams of “trailfairies” smoothing berms and polishing jumps. Over here the jumps don’t tend to be huge (3-4m tops), but they sometimes don’t have landings “huck to flat”, the Northshore is a fallen tree or the trail exits a gully through an abandoned mine tunnel only just as wide as your bars 😂😂😂. Often the “consequence” attached to a feature (with the exposure) can be a 60m plus drop to a shallow river bed or at best a 5m slide through thorny rain forest to the next bit of trail. So with that in mind and the nearest hospital 2-4hrs drive away, no phone signal and no mountain rescue to drag your sorry ass out of the ravine, I’m finding that I’m riding everything very defensively, on the first run. 😉

The geology, flora and forna make this a beautiful place to visit, the raw approach to trail building make it a truely amazing place to ride.

Of course, this applies only to the places I’ve ridden so far, I’ve bearly scratched the surface of what is available. The Heaphy track and Old Ghost Road are on my list, I missed Wairoa Gorge on the last visit and need to get there – there are many super long distance rides and races to do like The Pioneer or Coast to Coast or Alps2Sea, sadly I won’t be here for many of those events, but if you can suggest some trails I should try, get in touch in the comments!!

Peace out :bloke