Review for Clayton Vale MTB Trails

Rick0007:

Situated just behind the Velodrome and a few minutes from Manchester City centre, the vale trail is a surprising trail in a surprising location. There is ample parking in the Velodrome car park and its 2 minutes from the skills area, 5 from the trails. Reception can direct you towards the trails and skills area and even provide you with a map of the routes. The skills area, although small has a lot of features to practise on. Rock garden, table tops, berms and pump features. But due to the location tends to be dominated by kids on bmx's. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be a pit packed on a weekend or school holidays. The trails are one big loop of blue trail, with shoot off’s of red, black and orange. The best ride seems to be to do them in order as you traverse the blue route and double back around in an ever increasing loop to get a good couple of hours riding. ~The blue is as you would expect, purpose built, hard packed, sand that is dusty and has a bit of loose gravel on the top. An easy ride and nice cycle for anyone who owns a bike. The blue does have some fast and flowy sections you can really get a thrill out of. ~The red trails are fun, twisty tight turns to make the most of the space available with some various features thrown in such as the odd 1ft drop off and rock garden. Again they are all hard pack with a bit of loose gravel in places and are pretty dusty at the moment. ~The black and orange are much like the red in regard to turns and length but obviously feature a lot more technical features. Due to the limited space the features seem to come up very quickly. For example one section features several drop off’s in a row that feel more like riding down a set of steps. Maybe this is intentional but for me it takes a lot from the flow of the course. The climbs around the trail are good, again for beginners as nothing is too testing but you can get a sweat on! Way markers as mentioned in the above review are missing or lying around the floor. They only tacked some laminated A4 arrows about the place and unfortunately, they have been torn down by some people. Some more permanent markings would definitely be of use, and it’s well worth picking up a map from the Velodrome. Overall Clayton Vale is a great place to learn and advance your riding, but I think more advance and experienced riders would get bored before too long. I plan on using the trails for advancing my riding and skills. I would also like to point out that I think this trail would be great in winter. The wide tracks and surfaces should be great around that time of year. In all honesty I am probably underselling this place as I’m new to the sport and reviewing trails. Facilities are brilliant. The Velodrome has a café, on site bike shop, free parking and you can even get into the viewing gallery to see the riders around the Velodrome and massive bmx indoor park.

Free Parking Cafe Bike shop Great for begginers Great for learning Good skills area Nice use of space and good variety of trails Easy to get too