Day 42: Sunshine trails in Planai-Schladming
11 Aug 2011
Day 42: Dry trails in the sun at Planai bike park. It was baking hot today, with deep blue skies. And this is a stunning place – views out over the valley to the Dachstein Mountain Range, craggy grey rocks that launch out of the green rolling hills as if they have somewhere to go. The town is a bit of a building site, at least the area around the gondola station is, with cranes and concrete all over the place. This is all in preparation for the FIS Ski World Championships in 2013 – starting early to make sure everything is ready! The impact on the bike park is pretty minimal. A small part of the DH trail right as you get back to town has been bulldozed, but a short detour takes you through a field and you are back on the course again in time to run down the Biker Cross course and in to the dirt jump and pump track area. There is one gondola to access the trails, and each cabin takes one bike on a hanger on the outside of the cabin. It is modern and fast moving, but even so it still takes 20 minutes to get to the top station as there is over 1000m of vertical to gain! And you can see so many trail sections running down under the lift as you go up. There is a mid-station, but plenty of great trails above so not worth getting off unless you’re pushed for time.
Off the top there is the “Rookie Trail” and the “Pro Downhill” trails. Both do ‘exactly what it says on the tin’. Actually there are some really fun turns on the rookie trail for every standard of rider, but these are interspersed with sections of fire road. Things get a lot steeper below the mid-station, where you also get a couple more trail options. The downhill is trail is joined by the “Downhill Advanced” and “Downhill WC” (WC for World Cup) trails. The WC sections consist of steep roots and can by bypassed on the advanced DH which consists of steep machine-built berms instead. Off to one side of the hill is the new “Flowline” trail which is smooth and typically ‘flowy’, with a few sections of optional northshore. Easier than the DH tracks but this course does not run all the way to the base and merges back with the DH tracks later on.
We managed to get a few good pictures of us and other riders which also give you an idea of the incredible views. Tim experimented with a couple of composite images which is how he manages to be in the picture at the same time! And we had a good chat with locals Gary and Cecile as well. Gary is one of the trail builders here so will have more from him tomorrow.
After a long day, and with Tim carrying 18kg of camera gear on his back, it didn’t seem like a good idea to finish on the last section of the UCI DH course once we got to the end of Flowline, so we opted to roll down the road. Only we didn’t really know what road or direction in which to roll. Moments like this so often end in epics, climbing out of woods tired hungry and thirsty 2 hours later. We had 10 minutes of getting totally lost in the woods but then got lucky and found a sweet bit of natural trail that led us down and out right by the gondola. Could have been so much worse and we live to fight another day.
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