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I have visited wonderful places, and ridden many amazing trails, but I am struggling to think of a ride without an inevitable boring or transit-y section. I was mulling this through while riding on Atholl Hill at Dunkeld last weekend which has fantastic trails, but can I think of a ride which is all good riding, with no "meh" bits where you have to ride a KM or so along a gravel track or face a boring climb? If all climbs were interesting it would be great.
The Whole Enchilada in Moab?
The Magnificent Seven? Incredible with superlative riding and some real jeopardy, but I am sure this has some sandy jeep trail bits?
Comfortably Numb in Whistler comes pretty close, but it is tarmac drag out to the start... Seven Summits at Rossland is great, but is a point to point.
What are your best? One, maybe contentious, rule: No gates...
Depends if you mean trail, or whole ride.
All the best trails have slogs in or out, that's what keeps them tragic free, and hence the best 😉
My favourite local ride here, the monstrous Bec Rouge. The climb is on singletrack all the way, although you do have to push at times. The descent goes from the summit of the mountain all the way to the valley floor and is top-drawer singletrack all the way. There is (at least, depending on your skills / cojones) one big rock step that you have to hop off for. One village and road to cross to extend the descent all the way to the valley.
Probably stretching your definition a little, as it's best done with a drop-off as high as you can (still 1000m of climbing though!). Otherwise you'd have to ride some road or skip the final descent to complete the loop. Road goes past my house though.
For me, various routes around Edale/Ladybower would come close. Dependibg whether your definition of 'killer' includes climbs...
Hayfield > Jacob's > Rushup > Roych > Mount Famine > Coldwell Clough > Campsite has very little filler for my money.
A bit out of your way, but my local park is going to be the site for the 2032 Olympics MTB events. I ride there a couple of times a week and can honestly say it's never boring. Some of the climbs are hard work, but because they're technical. It's possible to ride about 40km of quite intense singletrack with no gates, no boredom. Extra bonus is the wildlife - i've seen some rare birds and butterflies, there's a roaming Emu and plenty of marsupials (it's pretty cool to follow a wallaby full tilt down a trail).
National Parks hand management over to the local council next year and apparently World Trail (builders of Blue Derby, Cairns, among others) have submitted plans for 40km more trails. It's 655 hecatares of forest, about 10x the size of Dyfi IIRC so plenty of scope.
Then in a few hours time I'm heading to Hiddenvale Adventure Park where we'll get a couple of days of 60+km rides in, again without any need to ride boring stuff.
There's no massive endless elevation, but plenty of steep stuff that means you're up and down a lot, which in a way is preferable to having to do hour long climbs.
The Whole Enchilada in Moab?
There's some pretty draggy climbing and there's that slightly uphill sand trap half way along the decent that's is frankly just a bit soul destroying.
Lord of the Squirrels? There's always the threat of grizzy bears which I would definitely put in the "all killer" category.
Do you actually want an all killer ride? On some of the longer mountain descents that are pretty full-on, maybe Luchon for example, I'm pretty beaten up and drained by the bottom. Compare that to Morzine that is generally more fun, mellow, fun, mellow repeat. Same for climbing, if it was all tech I'd be done in before the fun part. I like the climb at Cwmcarn on the twrch in this respect. Starts fun, up and a bit down and swoopy but you don't really gain much height, then some more technical climbing to get you up a bit, then when I'm about done with that a chunk of steady fire road to get you some proper height to descend from. That's just about perfect to me.
Swinley Blue?
I like filler on a ride, time to look around and chat and eat flapjack and reset a bit. It's key to a good ride in my eyes!
Do you actually want an all killer ride?
+1
I'd say generally you want the best bang for your buck, which usually means an interesting climb, with a bit of variety (fire road, double track, forested, open, nice views, the odd bit of single-track linking it together) that get's you up efficiently. Then spend the effort building descents.
e.g. Afan, that first climb feels like it should be a descent, and it's a killer in the wrong sense of the word! Then after that there's miles of fire road. I think it would almost be less tiering to send you up the fire road, descend the climb, then ride up the fire road again!
Swinley Blue?
The drag round to the whole nine yards disqualifies it (and the fire road back from where it meets the Red). Along with the trail building teams continued efforts to ruin Stickler with diversions and uphill doubles.
Has anyone mentioned the trail behind the Nationwide, Swindon?
Has anyone mentioned the trail behind the Nationwide, Swindon?
🤫
Yep gotta be the one when you’re operating at the tip of the ….
I may be hated for saying this, but an ebike let’s you whizz through the boring bits and focus on the fun.
I would say the Whole Enchilada comes close as the draggy bits are a tiny proportion of the overall length of epic stuff. But the ride back to town might kill that notion.
If you're of the mentality that a ride has trails (probably mostly descending) and necessary evil link sections (probably mostly ascent / road / fireroad), then I imagine you're going to be disappointed and have "meh" sections.
On all my rides the whole ride is the ride, so barring the 5-10min at each end (which is pretty much the same as my daily commute), then no there are no meh sections, not even the couple of times I ride 2 mins thru a pretty little village. If I moved from the centre of town to the edge and had the forest at the end of my garden, then I could genuinely claim 100% non-meh.
But someone who counts rides in runs would probably call that ride nearly 100% meh.
My interpretation of the OPs rules are:
A full route
Not uplifts or winch and plummet style e.g Golfie
No entry/exit transition sections of road or fire road etc
Can be a proper climb or even hike a bike but nothing awkward or annoying, or extensive pushing.
Racking my brain and struggling. Closest I can think of is Sticks Pass if you started and finished at the YHA rather than Glenridding.