Team Wideopen’s Chris Hutchen’s is on a mission to dig deep into the UK scene and explore a few of the UK’s best trails.
First up is the trails in Royal Deeside in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.
words by Chris Hutchens / photos by Ross Young / video by Thomas Hogben
Fresh from a weekend of racing the Scottish Enduro Series I decided to hook up with the Deeside locals and explore some of Scotland’s finest singletrack.
With Scottish pro and descendant of the African Giraffe still in the area we grabbed Ben Cathro to join us for the day along with local pinners and brothers Martin and Ross Young. NE born and bred (Inverness) Thomas Hogben joined us with him camera ready to capture the riding.
These guys were responsible for building some of the more established trails that we rode – but of course – there are many others in the area putting in the graft now. Huge thanks to those guys for their hard work in making great trails for us to ride.
During filming Martin pulled out a spade, hidden in the dying bracken, to touch up some of the trail. There’s a super impressive ethos of maintenance across Aberdeenshire and while the trails might get hit with snow and rain over the winter there’s a love for the lines that fall down the hills. Aberdeen’s lucky to have such great tracks around and while new ones appear the old classics get fixed up by riders like Martin. He’d be the first to admit though that there are many others in the area grabbing a mattock, armouring trails and keeping the routes in a healthy condition in front of him.
With only a day to ride in Deeside we were limited to the number of trails we could hit but with names like Crack Cleaner, Heartbreak Ridge, Roots Manova, Don’t Tell Your Mother and Goosefest in the area there’s some class riding to be had. We could only touch a fraction of what’s on offer.
The final shout out must go to the trail builders creating the incredible tracks in the Deeside, there is clearly thought and many hour put into building then. They’re solid and seemed to even hold up to Cathro’s wild riding. It was the bike that broke before the trails. The way it should be!
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