Cannock, Stile Cop, bike requirement

all the xc trails are doable on a rigid so you will all be fine.

as for the DH at stile cop, you should have a walk down the trails before you hit them at speed. the red is easy and fine on a hardtail, ridge run is also good for beginners, stuff like little bringe will be pretty slippy due to the rain cuz of all the roots, but again after a few slow runs down you should be ok. easier on the full bouncers though.

my current fave trail, wonderland, is a bit more steep & technical at the top but the bottom section is great, my mate does all on his 100mm full susser.

have a look, and more importantly have fun.

The Red route is a fine introduction to Stile Cop it's like an average MTB red route (whatever that might be) except it's steeper and more sustained. There is nothing to catch you out or bite you in the arse but a word of caution people quickly become familiar with it, hit it very hard and get carried away (on a stretcher).

Fortunately the ambulance crews get there very quickly and they are a friendly lot they seem used to dealing with broken collarbones, ruptured spleens and bust ribs etc

There are 10 or 11 runs that are graded in terms of difficulty some tidy rock drops a 20ft double a 15 ft gap and a fair bit of woodwork if you like that sort of thing.

It's a minute or two from top to bottom or nearer three mins for a fossil like me. The push up is a sociable 15 mins.

Enjoy

miss notax wrote:

Fortunately I am the worlds slowest rider on downhill trails

With all due respect I would dispute that

DodgeT wrote:

Heard this a few times now and all i'll say is, some of the drops seem (even if they're not) quite big. Now, they may be only about 2ft, but a 2ft square edge drop is not common on the trail centres (red routes) i've ridden - cannock, llandegla, gisburn, penmachno etc.

Probably a fair comment I was thinking more in terms of the red route not being as gnar-tech-DH as some people might think. The surface is good, each obstacle can be tackled on its own and there's a section about half way down which is pretty mellow where you can take it easy and congratulate yourself on destroying the upper section before making a complete pig's ear out of the lower section

@ blitz, I got what you meant, but didn't want Jo Bloggs doing it, breaking his arm then saying "blitz said it was easy, I want my compo" blah blah blah

It's definately somewhere you should try / practice. The way I look at it is, even if your not wanting to get into downhilling, if you can get to grips with going down even the red run comfortably, its pretty safe to say there's nothing on a UK trail centre what is going to cause you any bother, so you can hit the runs much more confidently.

It's massive fun there, red is very easily rideable like people have said providing you're fairly competent and can cope with drops of 2ft or so, there might be one nearer the start which is closer to 3ft, but even then, thats hardly massive really and there's an easier lower option to the side of it. You just need to remember that speed is your friend on them.

But as blitz says it's quite easy to get carried away...