Bike Park Wales

[P-Jay]

Or... 'The Welsh Whister' as people who've clearly never been to Whistler have called it, is actually ahead of schedule - glad they subbed it out to private hands .

Anyway, it's now opening in August! 6 trails to start, 2 blue, 2 red, 2 black, more coming online at the rate of about 2 a year.

£5 a day to ride, £30 if you want to use the uplift - but there's going to be well priced season tickets which is great if you live 17mins away, and work 12 mins away.

Rowen Sorrell has built it, so you can expect lots of fast smooth trail punctuated with fast berms and nicely built, very man man features - or "a fooking BMX track" if you're very old school and grumpy.

Best of all, whilst it's a Gravity Park in the vein of Whislter / Les Gets Bike Park etc - it's designed to be rideable with trail bikes on all but the black graded trails.

[Gumstabber]

I'm excited about this! Thought there were going to be more trails at opening though??

[TedMaul]

Good news, been looking forward to this. Like the idea of doing a couple of hours ride in the morning and then using the uplift in the afternoon to just do some gravity.

So how does the uplift work, does it just take you to higher sections of the red/black trails and gravity takes you down, or are there specific gravity trails?

[P-Jay]

I think they were saying 10 trails at opening, I guess the infrastructure will be ready so they're going to open up with the 6 that are ready... who knows.

AFAIK all the trails are gravity based, they're staying away from the word "downhill" I think because they're not meant to be "downhill" race type tracks. There's one climb to the trail heads, meant to take 30 mins for a decent rider, or there's the uplift which will be ex-military type trucks.

How they're planning to run the uplift is what I'm mostly interested in, if I'm able to buy a season pass for it I'll be there A LOT, it's close to home / work than Cwmcarn for me (I live in Cardiff) so it's perfect for post-work riding, but if they only offer season passes for admission, or the season passes for uplifts are 'standby only' and priority is given to day-ticket holders like Cwmdown it won't be as good for me.

[n_const]

Where abouts is this going to be ? (Live in Cwmbran)

[anonymous-user]

Merthyr way I think, not sure but already looking forward to it though i think it might be a bit beyond my skillz....

[joema]

Gethin.

[MR Kirbyz]

Fellow cwmbranian here too!. Looking forward to this very much. Although Cwmcarn is closer i could see me going here more often tbh if it lives up to all the hype it is getting. PH meet on the opening day perhaps?

[zasker]

From Merthyr and did a site visit there with work last week. You can also see the tracks being developed from the other side of the valley. The visitors centre steel work had been erected, the roof was on and work had been started on the walls. £5 seems a good price for all day but how can they stop you using it as it would only take me 15 minutes to ride to the top from my house and then I could just ride the course. The long term planning speaking to them is to also develop the camping site and some family friendly cross country type trails.