Plus Trails Explained

With the release of our latest trail ‘Popty Ping’, BikePark Wales director and trail building expert Rowan Sorrell sat down to talk through exactly what puts the Plus in a Plus trail.

Being the UK’s largest mountain bike destination means that we provide a lot more variety than most other venues. We are essentially a trail centre, a downhill venue and a freeride park all rolled into one.

To cater for a wide spectrum of riders, we have a wide range of trail styles to suit different abilities and preferences, from natural technical style trails through to smoothly manicured yet highly challenging jump lines and everything in-between.

We’ve identified that going forward it would be useful to have a way of differentiating between a trail that is colour graded due to its natural technical difficulty and a trail that includes more ‘bikepark’ and freeride style features. For example, red advanced grade trails Vicious Valley or Bonneyville compared to other red grade advanced trail such as Insufficient Funds or A470 line.

And thus Plus trails were born!

The creation of plus trails allows the diverse groups of riders that use BPW to get the most out of the park. It also helps us to better cater to everyone’s desires and needs and to ensure that riders are informed when a trail may carry more risk if you don’t have the required riding skills sets. Simply look for the Plus logo on the trail grading information and trail map. 

What does this mean for BPW in the future?

Some of our existing trails have been re-graded as plus trails, as we expand and develop further as a bikepark it is reasonable to expect that we would include more of the features that you would find in a bikepark in Europe, North America or Canada such as gap jumps, larger drop off’s and timber Northshore drops and gaps. Plus trails give us the opportunity to do this and keep our wide spectrum of mountain bikers happy and stoked on riding at BPW!’