great-rock.tv is where I’m reviewing the mountain bike gear that I use. It’s also the place where I’m giving updates on skills courses, holidays and other Great Rock projects. You can subscribe to get the latest updates by email or by the RSS feed just by clicking where it tells you on the site.

The Winter Leaves from BasqueMTB on Vimeo.

Doug has produced another fantastic video, this time shot whilst exploring the forests as part of his winter project to find new trails. There are some photos and words describing what he’s up to at the moment here on his site. You’ll also find some excellent real world product tests elsewhere on his site. You know that the kit he writes about has been ridden a lot, and then been ridden a lot more. It’s a bit like dog years.

There are still places available for the Great Rock Basque skills and riding holiday in June this year. Click on the tab up above.

I’m off to Greece to run a series of skills courses with greek riders from 22-29 March. Here’s Fotis in a great poster that my friends over there have made to publicise the week. The feature that I wrote about mountain biking in Greece is out now in the latest issue of Singletrack Magazine. Reading this will make the ‘meat’ reference make sense.

The photo of Fotis ‘The Face’ is by George Papantoniou.

Had a great shoot last week with photographer Henry Iddon. I was riding my new 2011 Ragley Blue Pig, which is just such a good bike for riding the technical trails of Hebden Bridge. Henry took some great action shots in the woods and up on the infamous ‘Steps of Death’. We were blessed with sunshine and I’ll be using the stills as part of the next great-rock.tv video cast, which will be all about the Blue Pig and it’s smaller brother the Piglet. The ‘Pig Cast’ will be out next week.

Photo shoots involve riding the same bit of trail as many times as it takes to get the shot. Down and back up the Steps of Death certainly got my blood pumping.

Usually found on downhill bikes, I’ve fitted these awesome 2.5, dual ply, Black Chilli compound tyres from Continental on to my new 2011 Ragley Blue Pig. I’m riding the bike on the tech trails of Hebden Bridge at the moment and wanted tyres with lots of grip on the green slimy rock as well as in the mud and slither. I’ll be looking at  these tyres along with a load more from Continental in a future video ‘Rubber Cast’. Wonder what other items I can include as well as tyres…..