Would you consider that a good thing?

Hmmmm Good question. Probably not really, I quite like doing a sport that people don’t know much about, or really care.

Have you seen how busy Cairngorm gets on the 3 days of decent snow every year?

No thanks.

The more people do it the more mediocre it gets, trufax

It all depends how you look at this one.

I’d bet there is more time spent mountain biking per head, per year than there is skiing.

With skiing there are a finite number of days per year you can go, combined with limited locations hence the number of people there on a good snowy weekend. There aren’t many weekends why we can’t get out biking.

If riding were as popular as skiing

So you suggesting more ppl ski than cycle? Are you having a laff?

I like it the way it is. If you include road riding its bound to be less of a gap in popularity I have no idea of the numbers but I do wonder if there is a ski equivalent of being forced off the road by a tanker 🙂

Is skiing popular? Files that fact away.

I’d say that more people ski than mountain bike seriously but the number of hours spent skiing per year per person is tiny compared to the number of hours spent cycling.

I think about this quite a lot.

Arguably, the style of MTB in the UK is predominantly XC trail-riding – equivalent broadly to XC ski -> ski-touring. Taken this way, I reckon as many UK peeps do XC MTB than all the continentals do XC Ski.

Alpine ski is not comparable to DH MTB – Alpine Ski has been made accessible to a much wider range of ability. This is one reason why Alpine ski has developed into a massive family tourist industry compared with MTB which is still at the hobbyist stage.

IMO the key development that allowed Alpine Ski to evolve beyond a hobbyist activity was the acceptance to build fixed lifts, trails and resorts in the Alps. I don’t think this will happen in the UK due to conservatism over land-use. It may happen in the Alps when the folks there realise that the family market has 10x the potential of the current customer base and start to market the sport in a family friendly oriented way.

Sorry, for clarification I meant if lift-assisted alpine mountain biking in the summer were as popular as skiing

that would be ace.

it would mean more trails, specifically, more easy trails to cater for learners and grannies.

just like green/blue ski runs.

i’ll be old one day, and i don’t want to be bouncing down brake-bump-riddled Dh tracks when i’m 70, i don’t really enjoy them now.

(i don’t really want to be riding uber-techy ‘natural’ trails when i’m 70, they’re hard enough now)

at the moment, mountain bike trails marked as ‘green’ or ‘blue’ are almost always deadly dull gravel roads, some fun swoopy blues would be ace.

at the moment, most Dh tracks seem designed to get you back down the mountain as quickly as possible, a 10minute chairlift ride buys you 600m-ish of vertical assistance, but most DH trails seems to head straight back down the mountain in about 5mins.

if more people went alpine-chairlift-biking, this would encourage trail builders to build long contouring trails to stop lift queues getting too long.

if alpine biking was as big as skiing, i’d be able to take my 64yr old dad and my 5yr old nephew on holiday, and all ride the same fun trails, i don’t see how that’s possible at the moment.

(it is at glentress – sort of)

Have you seen how busy Cairngorm gets on the 3 days of decent snow every year?

Imagine if the trail centres were the only place we could ride and they were only open 3 days a year. It’d be a nightmare. If you compare like for like I’d expect mountain biking to be far popular than skiing already. I know plenty of people who own serious bikes but hardly any who have bought their own skis.