How hard is Top Chief?

bikesandboots, that video is a hard watch for me

Oh definitely, just flicked through it couldn’t bear watching all of it. I went looking for something more realistic than McTrail and Lewis Buchanan, as they make it look so easy. District Mountain Biker’s one was more relatable although he too is quite a bit faster/better than me.

Look at the other videos on his channel. He does ride some gnar to be fair, more than I do, and seems to manage ok. Noticed he has his thumbs over the grips though, maybe he has some reason.

i love it, went up the at the end of May. I was riding a 130mm 29er hardtail and it coped fine.

In total i did 5 runs. First run was slow, with many stops to suss things out. By the 3rd run i was cleaning the whole thing and pushing quite hard. As has been said earlier, speed is key. Just let the bike roll – and relax. Even on a hardtail, the rocky middle section was no problem if you just stay off the brakes.

It all went wrong though on the 5th run where i had a big one at that off camber burn and face planted a few rocks. Was wearing a half lid and have no idea how i didnt end up with more damage than a cut chin, nose and lips.

The Pitch did it years ago 😅

The dodgy corner on the boardwalk can be an eye opener. A couple of the bits on the rocky descent need a bit of care, apart from that it’s OK. The bottom bit is great and flowy.

Don’t know how useful any more/repeated info is, but just back from a couple of days up there, with three 17 yr old lads. They’ve not done that much, mainly the local stuff in Whinlatter. They didn’t quite ride it all first go and one had a semi OTB on that middle slab (riding a hard tail). He cleared it all on his second go and really enjoyed his third. We found the board walk bits fun and nothing to worry about. The whole trail is rollable, but that middle rocky section is quite sustained – as already said, easier than Laggan black, but probably harder than any other trail centre black I’ve done. I cleared all of TC first go on a hardtail, but a few bits on Laggan black took a second go. We also did the WC track, which I didn’t really enjoy much – TC is built for fun I guess, whereas the WC DH is for racing. The most fun was had on the lower Red at Laggan, with the big slab and then all the turn/jumpy stuff.

p.s. There are no red dots…..
But there was a chap with a suspected broken leg at the burn crossing

Aye, they’ve stopped doing it. Tbh it shouldn’t really make any difference, as most folk have said, first couple of runs should be a learning exercise really.

The red dots were definitely useful in the first couple of years when the trail was still kind of full of holes and lines that went nowhere, but a lot of those have been tweaked or just became obviously not good options as it wore in. I’d definitely have missed them on version 1 of the trail but maybe it’s not so valuable now?

OTOH there’s a couple of sections in the bedrock where they used to mark a deliberately more interesting line, and now probably everyone just rides through the easiest/most obvious one. Kind of like mcmoab, they’d marked the line they thought was most fun.