Even at GT its not about upkeep. In fact there are mutterings about them closing/not bothering with the black.

There used to be a nice wee bit of singletrack on the cross border from keilder to newcastleton, which is now pretty much a pavement. Recreational cyclists not mountain bikers are the big cash cow.

The resurfacing does make it pleasanter for walkers.

We can’t really complain, the trails are for sharing after all.

Anyway, I’ll give it a few months until the horsey people find them. That will quickly revert them back to a rocky, muddy, rooty mess.

Even at GT its not about upkeep

I don’t agree with that, there’s been loads of maintenance the last couple of years and areas of recent felling such as pennel’s vennel and blue velvet have new surfaces.

Do FC build and maintain mountain bike trails? I thought they just let folk use the trails they’d made and build some of their own on the grounds that it takes ten years for trees to grow. But the deal was that you couldn’t make a fuss when the time came to harvest the trees and your trail got trashed. Maybe there is more to it than than that though.

Personally, one of the things I like about off-road cycling is the way the trials change over time. A smooth path can get washed out by winter storms, then a smoother line may form as people use it or it may get churned up by some heavy machinery, but it’s all part of the fun. Plays havoc with Strava leaderboards though, I guess.

bigjim – Member

I don’t agree with that, there’s been loads of maintenance the last couple of years and areas of recent felling such as pennel’s vennel and blue velvet have new surfaces.

There’s some truth in it- the maintenance at GT is inadequate and mostly volunteer, there’s exceptions like as you say Blue Velvet recently, Spooky Woods a couple of years back- both times after forestry work that made a rebuild really necessary due to the amount of trail damage.

Usually they take good care of the trails while working around them, and they just need patching afterwards (like former ewok village, a while back). The (rubbish) rebuild on Pennel’s Vennel was actually a repair for water damage rather than felling. (not GT, but the innerleithen climb’s a perfect example of how well it can work, they clearfelled a whole block but the trail was almost untouched)

But it is definitely true that the maintenance is stretched too thin… There’s talk of decommissioning less popular parts of the trail network. As I understood it the new trail we put in for the EWS that cuts down from Boundary to Deliverance was supposed to enable them to remove most of Boundary from the formal trail network, for much this reason. Though I’m not sure if that’s worked out as we built it a bit steep 🙂

Its a great bit of trail that, maybe steeper than people are used to at GT but it is supposed to be the black.

I think there are more cuts due to FC funding so I suppose this will continue