Pentlands – Hillend – interesting times

marking a line and letting folk ride it wouldn’t be good enough and […]significant trail building would be necessary.

ok sure, those border hills seem to made of sterner bedrock! 🙂 or i could be wrong on how they build the inner’s trails 😉

Is there demand for 4x then? The racing seems to be dying and the lack of other venues might be a USP or it might be a weakness, hard for a single location to support any sort of scene.

Gradient examples. FW is 525 metres drop over 2.66km. So actually not so different to what you have there. Course, FW is very very flat in places. 1 in 5 but distorted by the flat bits.

Nevis red is a pretty nice gradient for a non-dh gravity course and is about the same drop over 5.5km- nicely 1 in 10.

Innerleithen’s Cresta and Gold Runs are both around 1.4km and drop 350 metres IIRC. 1 in 4.

For the people who know innerleithen but not the numbers, the Middle sections of the DH trails are all about 90 metres tall.

For the trails to be ‘All Weather’ there needs to be a degree of shelter too. Usually this is provided by trees. The images of the site look more like a gorse/bracken vegetation type. On a windy wet day it will be very exposed.

Maybe a drag tow installed from lower down rather than a fuel hungry vehicle? Drags are used for bikes at Les 2 Alpes, and in other resorts. They are cheaper to buy (2nd hand), install and run than chairs.

A suggestion here… Pete Laing’s doing some trailbuilding training sessions as part of the VAT Pack dig. They’re intended for people who’re actually working on that project but if you’ve never built trails, it’d be a good place to start- worthy local project, professional training. It’s not going to equip anyone to jump off and plan a massive project or anything, but it’d give you a grounding.

And even if this all comes to nothing, you’ll have helped the VAT Run 😉 Drop us an email if you’re interested and I’ll put you in touch with the folks there.

Different hemisphere, different lift, similar concept http://www.skyline.co.nz/queenstown/MTB/
MIght be worth flicking Brad an email to see what learnings they got from that as it is a private commercial interest (the gondola) and a public bike park or similar.
And good effort, many happy years dislocating my thumbs at Hillend inc teaching !

Ta muchly folks – plenty to think on here. Northwind – YGM

Cheers 😀

I grew up skiing at Hillend but live in Sheffield now was involved during some of the planning stages of the Ski Village track and uplift.

The Ski Village has a length of 180m and slope angle of 18 degrees and the lads have done an excellent job with the track next to it. Fun to ride, only a few pedals needed, so I would expect Hillend to have more than enough hill, especially if you take it all the way down to the road (we used to have to carry hire gear from the hut up to the slope so it can’t be that bad a push on a DH bike!)

However, the main (only?) commercial advantage this hill has over any other bit of dirt anywhere else is the ski lift, so a couple of things to bear in mind with uplift in specific:

Mechanics

How will bikes get taken up?
Will a rider take their own bike on their chair, hang it on the one infront/behind (needs someone to load/unload) etc. This will affect the upload capacity – one rider every other chair would be 1/4 the capacity of skiers (2 per chair). What investment is required? Hooks, hangers to fabricate. Every chair, or every other one?

Capacity

Circuit time / Frequency of lifts = Rider Capacity

Circuit time is total time from getting on the chair to getting back to the front of the queue and back on the next chair.

Frequency of lifts is how often a rider can get on a chair.

This will give you the number of riders in a continuous loop with no queuing. Add in time for queue and a %age factor to allow for rest stops/drinks/punctures to work out how many riders you can have.

e.g. – using random numbers:
60 seconds up
30 seconds to track
60 seconds down
60 seconds back to lift
210 seconds total cycle

Lift every 20 seconds

10.5 riders in a continuous loop – max 17 runs in an hour (hour divided by circuit time)

This assumes everyone riding full circuits in a continual flow…

15 additional riders in the queue would add 5 minutes (riders times lift frequency) queue time and the total runs go down to 7 (circuit time is now plus queue time).

Play with the numbers to work out how many riders per session. The longer the track, the more ‘buffer’ you have to absorb riders sessioning, checking lines, falling off etc.

I have an Excel model of this, drop me a line if it’s useful and I’ll polish it up and add notes – you can add your own times and play with the model.

However, bear in mind that if you have an event, everyone will start in the queue. Even with a lift every 20 seconds, 100 riders will create a 33 minute queue (cycle time irrelevant), if it’s every other lift, double that! Same again at lunch time…

Pricing

Regarding pricing, the slope need to make a profit – but don’t let them think it’s the same cost as skiing. Costs should be lower as those costs have to cover the matting, watering, equipment hire, ski techs.

Plus, there’s nowhere else to ski whereas, for riding, there is track build and maintenance but in terms of competition, we can ride bike anytime, anywhere, so competition is with any track, trail, berm or bit of dirt – no captive market.

Other things to think about include bike security and parking (bikes outside the cafe take up lots more space than a pair of skis!).

Sounds like an excellent project, fun to be involved in and always good to have somewhere else to ride. Engage the DH community, get a good track builder to consult and I’m sure it could work out well if the finances and logistics stack up!