[Closed] How hard is the kona dark side at mabie?

Pretty damn solid. Has it opened again?

Not sure. Never new it was shut. Hope it is open cause am dieing for a shot!

Bloody hard!!!

Yeah, hard work.

Hard, put flats on if you usually ride with spd's.

very hard, i walked it with my bike on my shoulder... 8)

Silly! Agree about the flat pedals as well

Have a look on pootube, loads of people there who have riden it.

I did the same ton 😀

"put flats on if you usually ride with spd's"

what?

If you always ride with SPDs (And are fully comfortable with them, everywhere) and never flats, then surely swapping to flats is a recipe for losing some shin flesh?

I ended up walking it all 2 years ago, though I'd never really ridden (or seen) anything like it at the time

Some pics:
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My Gran found it tricky (but she is English) - I told her not to use her fixie tricycle, but you know what they say about sucking eggs......

Theres a stick over a ditch as the qualifier - if you can't ride that then don't bother

I carried/pushed my bike around a la Ton

If you are a XC clipped in jeyboy, then yes you will hate it, but on a nice small nimble frame, a small amount of balls and you will love it.

Think about what you ride and what you like. If you need a 5" full sus to save you on a normal XC groomed trail I wouldnt reccomend you try it!

Well i'd put flats on if I went back despite being very comfortable on spd's. I'm thinking i'd rather be able to put my foot down quickly instead of slighlty less quickly and keel over 3 or 4 foot in to a load of pine branches/rocks etc...

Its not as though 'not being used to flats' really matters when you're stop/starting and not going faster than 5mph is it?

Clipped in XC jeyboy? have you been reading too much MBUK or have i missed a joke? 😀

I did most of it on a charge duster, clipped in with the seatpost 2" lower than what i'd normally run it at. I didn't do any of the jumps/drops though...

Ride along lots of kerb stones for practice.

yep kerbs are great practice

Hey addicted to tailwind, The darkside main hill is open, however the taster section at Vadar's Lair is currently closed due to the fact that most of it was destroyed during harvesting operations earlier in the year/tail end of last! There are currently some upgrade works and repairs being carried out on the main hill as well but that tends to be during the week so everything should be clear if your coming up this wknd! I would also recommend taking some flats and a pedal spanner with you, its a long ride out to the start to find you're not comfortable on it with spd's! It is definitely techy and few people can do it without dabbing at more than one point!! It's probably worth having a look at youtube to see what you can expect!!

had a gander at this on Monday and i must say it's f'kin nuts! i reckon there'd be some parts that i could ride but the sideways rain just created a big slippy death slide. want to go back after a couple of days of it baking in the sun and have a proper challenge. i did notice a skinny to skinny right angle corner that looked nigh on impossible (or impassible) before i had to drag my sorry ass off the hillside through the heather.

Tangobravo's talking a pile of pish. I'm a "clipped in jeyboy" and i loved it! Managed the Darkside with 2 dabs on my old Anthenm (80mm). Saying that I did fall off the section of boardwalk on the descent to the loch (before the climb to the Darkside), oh and didn't do the gap jump thingy so he may have a point 😐
The biggest issue when I did it last year was the bees....loads of the little buggers! It was bone dry too, I wouldn't even contemplate it in the wet.

Right there with you Peachey, right there with you. That was the worst idea you've ever had.

It's bloody hard.

A bunch of us did it a few years back - took us 4 hours to cover the ?5km? trail, and none of us were exactly novices to riding woodwork. We rode probably 95% of it, but there was a LOT of sessioning sections.

I would recommend flats, but each to their own - just makes the inevitable bails easier.

eat_more_cheese - if you seriously did the whole thing with only 2 dabs, then you are indeed a riding god and the gap jump would have been a piece of pish in comparison to the rest of the trail.