PMBA

Hope Freeride Trail

Loads of work has been completed at Gisburn over the last few months with more planned into the future. The Hope Freeride trail is now rideable, exiting about halfway up the fire road climb to the quarry. It starts from the top fire road to the right of the quarry (heading towards the Dog & Partridge) weaving through the trees with a couple of jumps. It opens out into a clearer area before entering a really long right hand berm to get you to the jump line which has a couple of table tops. Clear those and you got a choice of two drops, a rollable one to the left and a proper, wheels off the ground drop to the right. Off the drops into a tight left hand berms shoots you down a nice bit of straight single track with a number of little jumps before turning right downhill once again to the two stone gate posts. The trail then heads left and back out to the fireroad. Short but very sweet. However i

t's not going to end there. Significant work has already been started to continue the line all the way to bottom fireroad. It's

still a mud bath at the moment so keep off but it's looking really good. All that's going to be missing is the uplift service to get you back to the top.

Many thanks to Hope, Tim from the D & P, Ed Oxley and the Cyclejunkies for all the time and effort put in to make this happen.

In other areas repairs have progressed well under whelpstone crag. It's all flowy again and a joy to ride. The forestry team have worked hard on this and it's really paying off. There's at least another 40 tonnes of surfacing material stock piled so it looks like further work is planned to improve the trail below the slab drop. There's also work underway to provide an alternative line after the second water crossing following Hully Gully. Abutments have been built to take a bridge across the stream (useful after a heavy downpour) to lead to a new section of singletrack running straight out to the fireroad.For those riders with a bit more Gnarr and rad about them the sharp right hander and short steep climb will remain.

The XC trail is also progressing, still a lot of work to do but considering the rather mammoth under taking being tackled a lot more has been achieved than wa expected. Hopefully the first (last section) of the new singletrack will be bedded in and ready to ride before Christmas provided the volunteers keep turning up. If you want to get involved (and we need all the help we can get) drop us an email tocontactus@pmba.org.uk to be put on the Gisburn email list to keep up to date with all the planned dig days. Alternatively follow what's going on on the Facebook page.