Mart's Ramblings April 2024

After what feels like the longest and wettest winter ever, we finally have a dry week ahead of us!  Much like the leaves unfurling from buds across the mountain, this time of year feels like we begin to hit our flow and spread our wings as wet trails dry out, new trails open up, new staff join our team and we crank everything up to 11. 

Some of you may have noticed on recent visits that we are trialling a few prototype trailers at the moment that have much faster load speeds than the current trailers.  As bikes have changed over the years they have, in some cases, become much longer. Add to that the amazing proliferation of younger riders on much smaller bikes and we have to cater for a massive variety of bike sizes which the old design doesn’t do well.  Our new prototype trailers have designated spots for kids bikes, allow for even the largest of 29ers and load much faster than the original design.  We are in live testing and tweaking now but hope to roll out the new designs across the fleet this year, watch this space!

On the subject of kids, as a father of two young boys (5 and 7) who both love to ride I’m always looking at how we can make the bike park more accessible to younger riders.  Especially when they are little, a full day of riding is too much and paying for a full day of uplift for just a few runs isn’t an attractive option so we have decided to make our very popular adult and child half day uplift offers a permanent thing!  Every Sunday afternoon from 1pm we are now making a limited number of these passes available for £35, that’s for both the adult and a child for 3 hours of unlimited uplift accessed riding!  Hopefully this will make it much easier for you and your small ones to enjoy BPW more frequently.  As these passes are available in limited numbers only, please always pre-book via our events page for the date you wish to visit. 

Trails is what gets you all excited right?! Well, same here! We recently undertook a survey of you, our riders to see what you want us to build next, we had an amazing response with 3,000 of you completing the survey.  Feedback from you is so important to us, it allows us to make sure we are giving you what you want and that we focus our efforts on the right areas.  Thankfully, the feedback you gave was very aligned with what we thought it would be so it’s good to see we still have our finger on the pulse!  It’s really valuable to know what you do and don’t like about our current trail network so we can continue to strive to make it as good as possible but also to know where you feel we have gaps and what style and difficulty of trail you want to see next.  I won’t give away all the details just yet but I am really happy to say that we will be able to meet your desires and give you more of what you are asking for in the near future and we cannot wait!

A470 Line Update:  “When will A470 be open?” has to be the phrase of winter 2023/24.  We started this big extension project in the autumn of 2023 knowing the trail would be closed for a couple of months but boy did we not expect for it to still be closed in mid April 2024!  The Trail Crew have done everything in their power to have this trail ready to ride as early as possible but the weather just hasn’t played ball.  The trail has been finished for several months now but it just hasn’t dried enough to be able to do more than a couple of test runs without destroying the trail.  We are really sorry the wait has been so long but there is just nothing we can do when we have had rain pretty much every day for 6 months.  The good news is, we are turning a corner with the weather now and we will open it as soon as it’s ready.  We’ve had the trail crew and a few pro riders give it a little test (have you seen the Sam Pilgrim teaser?!) and feedback so far has been epic.  Watch this space for more news soon.