Mountain biking has been growing year upon year on the island but its still very much an underground scene, with little sanctioning from local forestry, you need to be in the know to find most of the trails out there and that isn't set to change anytime soon.

"We have some rad trails littered across the Island but its a lot of the same thing, we have real potential to create so much more" - Jim

The vision of building the bike park was clear, make mountain biking more accessible to everyone, promote cycling tourism to the Isle of Man and build a network of progressive bike park type trails which support and grow MTB, with the right people driving it.

Rewind back to 2016, Jim was spending his time sat behind a laptop developing a business case, seeking potential investors and meeting with local government departments to try and make the bike park a reality. After 2 tireless years of work and being left feeling like little headway was being made with local government, it was decided that in 2018 a different approach was needed... The tools were picked up and he headed out into the woods to start building a trail like nothing else on the island. Two years of digging by hand followed, weekday evenings and weekends that used to be spent riding now spent digging and the bikes mostly stayed parked up in the shed.

"Over 1,000 hours have gone into digging already. Plenty of cold, wet and dark nights / days through the winter, then in the summer making the most of the extra daylight hours but still using any wet, rainy days to get out and do shaping work. Its been a journey... lots of frustration, tough mentally and almost pushed me to quit riding! Huge thanks to the boys Kyle & James for breaking up the lonely days & nights of digging to keep me sane!" - Jim

Spring 2020, the tools are put down, digging stops and a summer of good times in the woods were ahead... At this point the Isle of Man had closed its borders to all outsiders to evade the impact of the pandemic and the annual TT motorcycle races held at the start of June cancelled, it was only appropriate that the cancelled TT Superbike Saturday event was renamed for the year... and so Sender Saturday was born and the boys were invited out to the woods for the first session of the summer on the newly built 'Fandango' jump trail.

Often a cliche but this summer has been all about progression and watching everybody riding has been incredible, from those just trying to dial in the first few jumps and find their way down the trail ticking off features to others pushing on and working on learning tricks. When summer was all said and done some of the best days in the woods on 2 wheels had been had and the riding game had been elevated.

Heading into the coming winter things are looking different from previous years, with a crew of lads who share the same love for wild days in the woods now established, we have a digging crew stoked to help elevate the local riding scene and trail building, the hype for what is going to be created is high!

Work on the Fandango trail is set to continue and detailed workings have been submitted to local forestry with the hope of keeping the bike park dream alive and building a new blue graded flow trail which would be massive for the progression of mountain biking on the Isle of Man.

We now just patiently wait and see if local forestry will give the green light for building the blue trail...

Big love to Andy Skillen of GBN for all the media content, filming and production.

GBN - Gnarly but Nice. Maker of nice garments for the gnarly and investors in the local wheeled scene. KEEP IT GNARLY... BUT NICE!