Off to Hamsterley today for the first time s I am in the area. Looking at the red route.

What are people’s experiences and thoughts on this trail centre?

Cheers

its great, red and black both good, a good mix of riding to, its very compact so you can do a lot in a fairly short space of time

Thanks

Anyone else?

Best to link up parts of the black and red. Black is generally pretty rooty and the red has some cracking new sections.

Start at the visitor centre and go up the black and follow that until you get to the Grove – from here head up to Transmission, Accelerator and the newest bit whose name I can’t remember. Back to the Grove and rejoin the black/red climb up to the downhill course and do Section 13 and then again rejoin the black back to the car park.

http://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/HamsterleyREDTrail.pdf/$FILE/HamsterleyREDTrail.pdf
http://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/HamsterleyBLACKTrail.pdf/$FILE/HamsterleyBLACKTrail.pdf

There are loads of unmarked trails through the forest but you’d need to be with someone with local knowledge or have a lot of time to look them out.
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?t=h&om=1&ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=110903447243019790336.000444bb71010500bdd28&ll=54.667081,-1.905441&spn=0.070486,0.150375&z=13

Thanks team, that’s great

Personally prefer to mix up some black and some red,missing out some of the red section. can be good to start with skills loop as a warm up. One nice route that should only take a couple of hours max is half the black, then do transition then finish the black. Edit woops, just as above

GPS for the above suggestion: http://www.mtbtrails.info/Trail_Venue.aspx?VenueNumber=72#TrailNumber129
Misses out all the crap fire road on the red.

I like to think of the main route at Hamsterley as the Reddishblack.