Is the Bike Park world growing or slowing?

dascorer

Anyone got any thoughts as to why a bike park the size and standard of Whistler has not established itself in Europe? Many pretenders to the throne but nothing on that scale despite a larger population of riders within the geographical area. Why do we still need to fly to Canada to get facilities that are so good!?
On this topic, check the latest blog post from WorldBikeParks.com...
http://blog.worldbikeparks.com/2012/08/18/epic-potential-of-bike-parks/
And check the website to see just how many bike parks are popping up. So surely it's just a matter of time...?

ilovedirt

Portes du soleil? not exactly a bike park, but it has a lot more lifts and trails than whistler...

paul.skibum

I ride at Silver Star - a pretty good bike park by BC standards. Not up to the same level as Whislter due to lack of trails and vert but good for what you get.

If I compare our hill to the Portes du soleil we get the following:

Silver Star
Vertical drop - 760m
Lifts open to bikes - 1
Number of trails - 18 (green to double black)
Longest Trail - 7.1km
Operating dates Last weekend in June to first weekend in Sept with couple extra weekends

PdS
Lifts - 10-25 depending on time of year (but 25 for the time Silver Star is open)
Max vert - 1000-1200m
Bike Parks - 5
Dedicated proper DH trails - 15 (or there abouts)
Total number Kms of trail - over 250km

The day pass for the PdS is cheaper than Silver Star and way cheaper than Whistler.

IN addition the PdS offers miles of walking and hiking trails an infinite variety of restaurants and places to stay, numerous bike shops etc etc .

If I were booking a one week biking holiday and I was based in the UK I wouldn't consider flying to Canada - if I were booking a weeks holiday mountain biking based where I am I would consider flying to europe (not necessarily the PdS) and I dont think I'd get bored riding there where as a bike park in canada you can exhaust the trails in 7 days.

IMHO.

Anonymous

Whistler, I've not been there on a bike, but I feel I'd go for two weeks for a start same as I go there for skiing, and I'd explore outside of the park. There's loads about the area and right down to Vancouver, plus you can spend a little time doing stuff off the bike too (dealing with hang overs probably).

But depends what you do. If it's pure DH and freeride you're more limited perhaps. When I go skiing there I see much the same with the snowboarders from Europe who only go there for the terrain parks. Nice parks, but very tiny fraction of what's on offer and crazy to travel all that way just for them!

If you can mix DH with XC/AM you've got loads to do out there.

YeehaaMcgee

I was snowboarding in Mottaret (Meribel/Courchevel/Val Thorens region - 3 valleys) in Janurary, and was blown away with what an awesomely large interlinked area that was accesible. It would be just awesome if they could make use of most of it for a truly epic mountain bike park.

Anonymous

3 Valleys is immense. So much so that you can get stuck if you are staying one end and are trying to get across the valleys at the end of the day and miss time the lifts

ilovedirt

Thing is, apparently the lift companies made sod all money off us mountain bikers in the summer. It's the winter when they make all their money. Same with the bike shops in the towns apparently (mate was chatting to one of the mechanics in a bike shop in morzine when we were there). I guess they get a lot more rentals in the winter, and lift passes for winter are astronomical compared to the summer. Personally, I wouldn't pay that sort of price unless I was minted, which I'm not.

felix.london

Plenty of lift accessed bike parks near me; Serre Chevalier (where I live), Montgenevre, Bardoneccia, Sauze d'oulx, La Grave, Les 2 Alpes, Alp Duez, Vaujany and plenty more

paul.skibum

dascorer wrote:

Anyone got any thoughts as to why a bike park the size and standard of Whistler has not established itself in Europe? Many pretenders to the throne but nothing on that scale despite a larger population of riders within the geographical area. Why do we still need to fly to Canada to get facilities that are so good!?
On this topic, check the latest blog post from WorldBikeParks.com...
http://blog.worldbikeparks.com/2012/08/18/epic-potential-of-bike-parks/
And check the website to see just how many bike parks are popping up. So surely it's just a matter of time...?

So I just read the opening blog post on that website (which I assume you have linked to because you either wrote it or run the website or both.

Basically your post is massively flawed in many of its assumptions and your understanding of the European bike park scene as far as I can tell.

You mention Les Gets and Chatel as two seperate parks. They are covered by the same lift ticket, you can ride between them in a short period of time - if you are in LG you bike downt he road to Morzine, up two lifts, down one DH run, up another lift and drop into Chatel bike park - with a bit of planning you can be there nice and early.

Morzine, Les Gets and Chatel probably exceed Whistlers visitors numbers on a daily basis throughout summer and draw crowds from UK, France, Italy, German, Switzerland, Holland, Scandinavia and so on. The scale of the area including all its non bike related activities is vast.

Other ski areas have long established bike parks and are expanding constantly and also have a great ntwork of other activities associated. Europe as a whole has the most extensive network of all mountain trail riding going so it is impossible to quantify the number of DH oriented riders who would be drawn in my larger and larger bike parks. I suspect in fact there is a finite number of riders and at some point continued expansion will end up diluting the pool to such an extent that the smaller less well managed parks will fail.

In addition, Europeans treat holidays as holidays - they go for extended periods, at least a week and make a logn trip out of it often with break days. Typically the north american market is day, two day or logn weekend trippers, Whistler is often very quiet midweek even in summer where european parks tend to remain consistently used throughout the summer months and due to the scale of places like the PdS, the lifts dont get anything like as crowded as the people are diluted over a huge trail network.

Canadaian bike parks do have trail maintenance well sorted vs the french who tend to only bash out the bumps at the start and middle of the season, but the trail crews also put together new trails each season and Chatel is a great example of a rapidly expanding park, which in turn has pushed Les Gets to up its game again to maintain its position.

Whistlers summer visitors numbers are a very small percentage of its winter numbers but they manage to make it work and break a profit, same as Silver Star where I am. But half the reason they are run as bike parks is to maintain their name in the market place for the money making winter months.

ilovedirt

paul.skibum wrote:

You mention Les Gets and Chatel as two seperate parks. They are covered by the same lift ticket, you can ride between them in a short period of time - if you are in LG you bike downt he road to Morzine, up two lifts, down one DH run, up another lift and drop into Chatel bike park - with a bit of planning you can be there nice and early.

This, yeah Chatel and Les Gets both have their own 'bike parks', but I would class everything under the PDS region as one big bike park, as one lift pass covers ALL of it, and as Paul says, you can get from Les Gets to Chatel in about an hour so. That might sound like a long time, but on the way you have three lifts in Les Gets, two in Morzine, one in Avoriaz/Lindarets, another on the other side (can't remember the name) and then about three once you get over to Chatel, each with at least one (and more in most cases) main trails to ride, with many more offshoots on them. And that's only a small area of the PDS. I've not been anywhere else, but I daresay the same is true for a lot of the other lift accessed areas in the Alps/Pyrenees etc.

Northwind

Likewise in Rhone-Alpes... you've got Les Arcs, then 20 minutes drive away Tignes (with Val d'Isere connected by lift, and on the same free pass), van uplift at Sainte Foy, maybe 30 minutes drive to La Thuile. No idea how many trails that covers, we only scratched the surface. Not quite as centred as Whistler but still a ridiculous amount of uplifted riding, in every flavour you could want.

dascorer

Paul thanks for your comments. I agree if you consider Les Gets and Chatel as one and the same (and throw in the rest - Morzine etc) then the PdS is a pretty serious contender. But although part of the PdS, each hub is run as a separate bike park, and many of the link trails are not maintained. I’m not on a campaign for Whistler here, but they have a surrounding trail network - outside the bike park - managed by WORCA...http://www.worca.com/ which is pretty special. You say yourself that to get from Les Gets to Morzine you have to ride down the road (have done it many times). That just seems a bit of a waste!

The blog was intended to prompt discussion but “massively flawed” is a bit unfair, especially given that we visited 19 of these European parks and discussed the issues with the bike park operators. They all face their own individual difficulties that somewhat restrict expansion, although they are certainly not insurmountable. I agree with you that Chatel is really pushing things on now, currently installing a new chair lift from the mid-mountain point to replace the archaic 2-man thing that took ages. But Les Gets has had huge difficulty putting in extra runs underneath the Chavannes lift - the main route back to the town - as the trail would cross the land of 4 different local farmers. Getting permission from all 4 has proven nearly impossible. There are similar issues throughout Europe due to historical land ownership in the mountain regions.

As for the European parks being consistently used throughout the summer months, our experience throughout July and August was of relatively quiet bike parks for one reason or another, except when hosting an event like the Megavalanche. Although maybe this is just reflecting a difference in riding culture - do riders tend to spread out on the vast network of natural trails in the Alps, rather than spending all their time at a dedicated bike park? Totally agree with you about the smaller less well-managed parks eventually failing though.

Worth mentioning another region - Saalbach-Hinterglemm in Austria. This is a pretty big area with new development underway, and it also includes this years UCI World Cup venue Leogang, so great value for money there.

paul.skibum

I just typed a whole long further reply but it got deleted somehow. I cant be arsed to do it again.

Suffice to say Winter makes money for all resorts and new lifts are there for winter. Summer may get a suplemental benefit but ultimately they are there for winter.

Europe may suffer from truculent farmers with holding land use but ancient land use also gives europe its huge network of trails that weave through the mountains - trails like GR5 in the PdS are amazing routes that span the Alps (not just the short section commonly used to get from Mosettes to Linderet) and I think the % of riders in Europe that use the whole trail network without necessarily needing lifts is what keeps numbers down in the bike parks.

I dont know what the true rider numbers are for europe or the possible market could be for a large whistler style bike park but the main thing to overcome for anything like that would be land rights.

Oh and to get from Les Gets to Morzine I actually always used the donkey track which follows the stream and could be a good fun fast little track if I wasnt riding the lift. Only used the road a couple of times if I was in a hurry.

Anonymous

dascorer wrote:

Worth mentioning another region - Saalbach-Hinterglemm in Austria. This is a pretty big area with new development underway, and it also includes this years UCI World Cup venue Leogang, so great value for money there.

And they know how to party there too , or at least they do in the winter.

Anyway, good point about holiday attitudes. Very true in North America they do a lot more short weekend breaks than full week trips, and two weeks is unheard of. They get really crap holidays. A lot of ski resorts (and thus many of the bike parks) are near to a major city so they just load up the SUV and drive up for the weekend. As said, they're quiet during the weeks. Another reason why I like skiing out there, no massive queues of rude French people

ddraver

I'm a big Skier, been doing it since i was 4, Garp Yaar Seasonaire and everything.

I came back to Serre Chevalier for the summer season after my winter and there was nothing there for the summer - OK you could put your bike on the lift and ride down some firetracks but there was nothing that you would consider proper fun. Basically it was a destination for kids/familes with some easy tracks up the valley floor. THer was the beginnings of a "scene" there but it was very small and usually consisted of the Winter Ski Instructors.

That was 10 years ago! Now it seems that every major Ski Resort has something available for MTBing in the Summer, There are a few on this thread that I ve not heard of as Summer destinations even...

So to answer the OP - It would appear that the Bike Park world is very much growing! However, like Ski Resorts, there are places that focus on different styles of riding.

YeehaaMcgee

dascorer wrote:

Paul thanks for your comments. I agree if you consider Les Gets and Chatel as one and the same (and throw in the rest - Morzine etc) then the PdS is a pretty serious contender. But although part of the PdS, each hub is run as a separate bike park, and many of the link trails are not maintained.

PdS is actually one huge megaresort. The fact that it's so big that getting all the way from one side to the other should really be commended, not held against it.
You can have more than enough riding in one small area of it, for an entire week, then the next time you go back, stay in, and check out, another area and so on.