[Closed] Secret trails..would you...

i will tell you, but you wont find them, i will show you if you come out riding with me.

put the info in print and share it with the world? only a total idiot will do that.

that said there is plenty of stuff out there in .gpx that should be more closely guarded.

first rule of secret trail club is dont talk about secret trail club.

its not that hard at inners - you ride till you see a trail you fancy riding and follow it. its very rarely poor.

too many folk riding natural trails ruins them hence the local silence 😀

get to know the locals and it changes.

It'll be on Strava, I'd have a look there 😉

Go to Strava and do a segment explore of the area you're interested in. Chances are someone's made the "secret" stuff into a segment. I've found lots of new trails in an area I've been riding for years using this approach 🙂

Well you are right of course, but I have seen the trails on video, I don't live locally, so it is pretty frustrating, I applied the go on the hunt philosophy to the trails from the DH hub but these other trails are a harder nut to crack, you are right I guess once word is out about the quality of said trail, they are trashed in no time.

Try Strava segments OR some twit will have put a video up on youtube or vimeo. I've found several that way.
I have scoped out a secret trail not far from my house, gonna keep it secret as long as I can!

strava heatmaps are a very useful tool for finding trials.

The trail nirvana behind Nationwide in Swindon was secret once.

Strava?! YouTube?!

Keep it old school and follow tyre tracks

It will probably be an old school hunt for tyre tracks, unless I can butter up the guys in the LBS, rush in looking windswept, do you think a spare tube will buy these guys!.

we have a 'no mapping' rule on our secret stuff 😛

not really enforcable though....

Are we talking dh track?

I think the term is Enduro these days, to give those in the know a clue, there was felling over there recently, destroying one of the better trails, I understand the rules, email in profile if you are feeling benevolent :-).

People don't really want to talk about local trails wherever they are. You get a lot of people at mabie asking about them as well

Beans can be spilled if it's marked on the OS map, IMHO, - that's just being community-minded and letting other riders know if a FP / track is worth the investigation.

Off-map stuff you have to investigate for yourself - but being a trail-sleuth is half the fun.

The gpsies site is another one for info - some 'helpful' uploads there (depending on your pov).

There are a lot of 'secret' trails on the Chase but really, most of the time all you have to do is look where the tyre tracks disappear into the undergrowth or go out at night or in the snow.

Some are just shortcuts, some are old racetracks, some of them appear to be non-FC sanctioned 'experiments' by people who really know how to build trails *cough* and some are being constructed by people with more enthusiasm than skill 🙂

I do my bit from time-to-time. When a sacred/legendary bit of singletrack gets destroyed by the FC or churned up into oblivion, I simply ride over the route again as close as possible to the original. If it's a popular secret trail I guarantee within a day someone else will have done the same thing and after a week or so the line has been restored. Later on someone else adds some edging or a bit of woodwork and so it goes until it becomes an 'awesome' secret trail.

Seek and you shall find as they say.

I don't think anything is "fair game" as such. Some people actually put a surprising amount of graft into making these "secret" trails and if they get over used/abused then they can either get just too trashed, or they can attract unwanted attention from the FC powers that be.

The ethos round my way tends to be that you either find it yourself (following the follow your nose strategy) or you get it shown off to you on a ride by someone who knows. If you're in a tight enough group then it can be described to you in the pub, this usually happens using terms and landmarks a non-local would struggle to relate to the ground 😉

Other than that Starva is by far the easiest way to find stuff, and no one who thinks they're the "only ones who know" should kid themselves that that's the case. Someone will almost certainly have ridden it and logged it... whether they've "segemented" it will depend on their ethics!

What's a "strava heatmap"?

Fergal,I think youll find that it is with people GPSing stuff (pre strava)and putting it on the web that some local secret trails are now strava lines.... ride the trails but keep schtum, itll be more fun for you in the long run...

I get much more of a buzz making my own secret trails and not telling anyone about them. Though sometimes you do want to tell people about them as just the right amount of traffic leads to sweet trails. Too much and it all goes Pete Tong. I grew up in the countryside and know there is an awful lot of people/groups you can annoy. Forestry commission, land owners, ramblers, game keepers, farmers, horse riders and the list goes on. Ok most of the time you do not meet anyone so if you do not leave much of a trail then you will not draw too much attention to your activities but if you start hacking up the heather, building big obvious features, posting on forums and getting too much traffic then you will piss people off, make people not like mountain bikes and probably get your trail trashed.

I build trails with jumps, berms and features but I am always looking for natural features to make them out of but I would never tell strangers where they are. That would just be stupid.

The stealth network on Mendip is invite only as far as I'm concerned.

You'd be hard pushed to find some of it without luck TBH, but post it on the internet?

We have the added disincentive that alot of it is slow techie stuff, which it would seem, is not as popular as wide open full bore swoopy barreling stuff and thus appeals to a smaller segment of riders anyway.

There's secret and then there's secret. Like, the enduro trails at innerleithen aren't on any maps but they're secret with a small s- they've been race routes, etc, so word is out. And they can deal with (sensible) traffic too. These things, no harm in spreading the word.

But then the stuff over the river, I think most people know there's trails up there but not so many know where they are- Secret with a capital S, and possibly a k as well.

But it's not always so simple is it. Strava certainly doesn't see any distinction. I'd be uptight about that, but then, I used Strava to find some golfcourse trails I didn't previously know about so can hardly grumble!

Recommended plenty of times that Strava should support private or group only segments.

That and allow trail builders to take ownership of an area to hide some stuff. Tricky though as a land owner could do that and just hide or delete them all.

Problem is Strava is still mainly designed for roadies so it's assumed everywhere you ride is a public road thus not an issue. Again, another recommendation is they add a distinction between road and off road.

Had quite a fun day searching for some of the hidden stuff near ladybower one trail was from a photo in mbr and easy to find. Narnia? Not sure i even found it, did find a down hill trail though.
You forum, posts, looking for tyre tracks in the mud. The search was better than the trails i found!

Exploring and finding tracks heading off somewhere is way more fun than trying to follow GPS. Have got into the habit even of seeing potential trails as I drive past some woodlands, and on a regular ride I'll often be looking out for hints of bikes going somewhere they weren't before. Often results in hacking away through bushes though as it turns out it goes nowhere.

love the hidden innerthien stuff. 🙂

Recently we've been taking a random turnoff each ride and purposely getting lost 😆 Found some cracking trails, and the job satisfaction is priceless, when you eventually roll up to a familiar looking intersection and link it all together

As one Tweed local said “they’re not hidden trails, just trails you haven’t ridden yet” 🙂

Also I saw the trails on the Telly the other day! Tracy and Chris made them look v easy!