Day 19: Huge Roots on the Todtnau DH

19 Jul 2011

Maria from Norwegian Road Trip gang shows us how it's done

Day 19: The Todtnau DH trail and Norwegians on tour. I know it’s not actually in the Alps, but we figured it was worth just popping out into Germany for a week to check out a couple of the bike parks in the Black Forest. And we were right. The Todtnau DH trail is an awesome course! It has everything – steep technical sections, fast sections, berms, jumps, drops, and famously if you have seen the pictures from the events here, big big roots. There are similarities with Wiriehorn, but here the trail appears more established and bedded-in. To be fair though, that should be expected as Wiriehorn is relatively new and Todtnau has been used for iXS events for a few years now. There is only the one other trail to the DH track (which by the way is just called “Downhill”) – a blue marked trail called “Wildride”. This is a fun track without the steepness and tightness of the DH. It’s what you would expect a blue to be – a couple of fire road sections and it also unfortunately finishes with this as well, but it’s a good roll as a warm up for the DH. Slightly surreal moment when we came round a berm on the last run down and met a mini goat hanging out on the trail with no intention of getting out the way. We grabbed it and are having a BBQ tonight.

Dan and David through a berm with the Todtnau valley behind.

There were plenty of people queuing to go up the lift but most were there for the rail-sledge – this is a crazy looking steel roller-coaster with little carts that twists it’s way down the hill right next to the lift. The chairlift has special bike hangers that take 2 bikes, and then you get on the 2-seater chair that comes behind it. Slightly precarious way of hanging the bikes from under the saddle only, but all was safe enough. Although the strong insistence that the bikes face backwards suggests there may have been a few gone astray in the past! We met up with a great group of riders who were on a road trip of their own – all the way from Norway! Had a good chat about the growing bike park scene up there, and they are now heading down through the Alps for a couple of weeks, with Slovenia the furthest destination before heading back north! Got a few pictures of them too so they are the other riders in the Facebook pics.

Dan and David discussing how to avoid bouncing off every root!

One thing worth mentioning here is the beating up the bikes are taking. We are all on 150/160mm travel bikes, and have now done nearly 3 weeks of consistent riding on big trails in the Alps. The bikes are getting shaken – many of the trails are designed for big hit long travel bikes and whilst they can be ridden with smaller travel bikes both the rider and bike can expect a real beating. The bushings are gone on one set of forks and the damping assembly has blown up on another. There is some serious bike maintenance required in the days ahead!

In late afternoon the rain hit hard. It seems to be following us at the moment and we can only ever out-run it for a day before it hits us again. However, we had done a good few runs by then with plenty of pictures in the bank, so we headed home. Bit of bad news – tomorrow we lose Tim for a few days. He is needed on other business back in the UK, so Dan and I will try and take pictures of ourselves at the same time as riding. Just had a crash-course photography tutorial (some nonsense about apertures and ISO…) so should be no problem at all!!

David rolls some steep rocks with focus (not fear!) in his eyes

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