Overseas & UK bike parks comparison

I’ve been wondering how the larger trail centres in the UK, such as Coed y Brenin, BPW and Glentress compare to overseas bike parks – for example Sun Valley or Fernie bike resort/parks. I gather the total area covered by the Tweed Valley Forest Park is 64 square km, but that’s spread between several seperate forests.

I’ve tried an internet search on land area of some of the overseas bike parks, but can’t find the land area they cover. My guess is that the UK forest parks are tiny in comparison, but just wanted to get an idea because I notice the overseas parks tend to have a lot more waymarked trails than the typical one green, blue, red of the UK centres.

I guess what I need to find out is how many Km of trails are packed into each Km2(?)

What prompt this is a conversation with my Canadian physio. She’d visited Glentress and was surprised that there was only one waymarked blue and red graded trail. She’s from Fernie and told me to check out their ‘bike resort’ website …..yep, they’ve got a lot of trails!

Point her in the direction of CyB. They’ve solved this issue by randomly chopping and pasting their 70km of trails into a myriad of other designated trails to vastly overstate the actually amount of singletrack.

Let’s do The Beast…
Nah bollocks, let’s do MBR followed by Dragons Back

Hmm, yes I know what you mean about CyB. Last tim I went it’d changed a lot from the early noughties. Being a lazy bugger, I quite liked the way it’s been changed (in some respects). But I do feel there’s a huge amount of untapped potential lurking in U.K. forests – particularly for beginner & intermediate level of riders.

Interesting topic. I know in Australia we have parks that are much larger than uk parks. It’s also very different. I ride most weeks in a local park with ~60km of trails across an area about 10 times the size of Dyfi (I use that example as I once looked it up for comparison). But the trails are predominately hand cut and the park is protected for conservation so you can’t take dogs.
There are also commercial parks, but they’re less common.