Feedback from a Church Stretton mountain bike skills weekend : Great Rock : Mountain bike skills & trips – Hebden Bridge, Gisburn , Basque, Pyrenees

Feedback from a Church Stretton mountain bike skills weekend

11 May

It’s always nice to get feedback about skills days. This email just landed from Chris who came along on the 1st Great Rock skills weekend on the Long Mynd near Church Stretton, Shropshire. I’m off down there tonight again to run 2 days of courses and hope to be back again later in the summer for a weekend.

“Anyway, just to say how much I enjoyed the Stretton weekend….you managed to keep pushing me, and it does do you good to go back to basics periodically.

Sunday was a step up, and as such the challenge stepped up and with the presence a bit of competition made for a cracking day.

Without a doubt my riding has improved, particularly on the hardtail, which is strange seeing as I did the weekend on the Enduro. Even managed to to bunnyhop a whole kerb without twatting the back wheel!! Tidy.

Hope to see you for Drops & Jumps next year.”

Gratuitous cheese pic. Damn, you can get some good cheese in Church Stretton

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Skills trail at Gisburn Forest

10 May

This is just a taster of the new skills trail at Gisburn Forest. It’s a work in progress at the moment and the working title for the trail is the ‘Hope Line’ because Hope Technology have sponsored the trail. The trail isn’t finished yet, but it is rideable as long as you watch out for when it just comes to an end!

Back in 2009 we walked out a line in the forest. We wanted a fun, flowy, pumpy, jumpy, bermy, bike-park-alike line. We needed shelter from the wind so that the trail was usable all the time, which is often a problem with jump tracks in our area. We also wanted the trail to be rideable by people on normal trail bikes and not just downhill bikes. As a skills trainer I wanted a trail to teach skills on, especially the art of pumping and jumping. Back then the section in the video above looked like this…..

With the backing of the Forestry Commission we set about building the trail with the help of volunteers. Later Hope Technology said they wanted to get involved and paid for Dan and Ben Hemmingway of Hemmingway Plant Hire to come in and put in some bigger features with machinery. Those boys did a great job and we’ve now got a cool little trail. Myself, Tim from Gisburn Forest Bikes and Martin College from Forestry visited the new Hope Technology factory yesterday and met co-owner Ian Weatherill. He came out to Gisburn with us and his lad William and we had a ride down the trail. It was a very positive day and we can look forward to getting a great finished trail, all tidied up and with a Hope archway as the entrance to the trail.

This section will be built into a fast berm in the next stage

We will still need the help of volunteers to carry on the work and there is a regular dig day on the last Sunday of every month. We meet at the pub at 9.30am. The pub which has always been called the Dog & Partridge has been re-named Gisburn Forest Bikes.