Stainburn Forest Mountain Biking

Read lots about Stainburn everyone said that it is short but technical. There was a lot of talk about which car park to use, the best one is near the top of the hill on the B6451 when heading from Otley.

There's no facilities other than a car park, thankfully we'd brought a flask of tea and some snacks. There are three marked trails, Red, Black and a Decent Line. We headed out of the car park and followed the Red Route Signs after a few initial drops we headed upward into the trees at the top of the route you have a choice of either heading down the decent line on your left or turning right and following the red route back down through the trees and back to the car park. It doesn't take too long to do a lap of the red route, however you can make the route much more difficult by using some of the obstacles that run adjacent to the main route, there are several technical boulder sections and a balance section on wood work. Although the route is pretty short it's fun to do several laps trying all the different technical sections.

To do the decent line you can either pedal up the road from the car park or do the first part of the red route. The line follows a wall that which marks the far edge of all the routes. Initially you swoop through trees, once this runs out there are many technical sections, some jumps and a black listed drop off, many of the more technical bits can be avoided, so once again there's lost of variety in quite a short run. It only takes a couple of minutes to do this decent but there's lots to practice. There are several routes to get back to the car park, they are all pretty tough going as the hill is pretty steep.

We spent most of the day morning repeating these routes, Finlay wasn't too chuffed about all the climbing but Jack loved the whole place. The decent line was his favourite and he was happy pushing pretty hard trying to go quicker each time he did the decent.

After we had a break I tried to get Jack and Finlay to have a go at the Black route, we headed out of the car park and attempted the first section, the kids had no chance, even I got a bit sick of dabbing my feet and having to push through parts of the trail, it was all a bit confusing so we made our escape back to the routes we were more familiar with.

We easily spend 4 or 5 hours on the trails and it's a great place to learn about bike control. By mid afternoon we decided to call it a day, there are other trails across the road which are less technical, we'll have to come back later to have a look at these.

There are lots of trails that are not sign posed and in some places you just 'do your own thing'. The steep hill side is a struggle for the kids, this is certainly not somewhere to go for a ride with the family, it's for improving your skills and learning to do new stuff!