The Great Trail Debate

So – which province boasts the best/gnarliest/smoothest/ scariest MTB trails in SA? Who better to ask than Chris and Tim Whitfield, who’ve just spent the last year researching the subject for their newly-released book, On Your Bike.

Twenty years ago, in 1997, Paul Leger wrote A Guide to Mountain Bike Trails: Western Cape. It was essentially a booklet – about 10cm wide, 20cm from top to bottom, and no thicker than this magazine – because back then, there wasn’t a lot to talk about.

In the Cape peninsula, Leger highlighted Tokai Forest, Silvermine (when the south side was open to mountain bikers, not the north as is now the case), and Deer Park. In his “Trail Description” for all three, he doesn’t mention the word ‘single track’ at all. Trails, by the definition of the time, were mainly “dirt roads and secondary tracks”.

Further afield, Leger alludes to some “legal single track with challenging technical sections” at Jonkershoek; and even then, Harkerville’s red route had “mile upon mile of weaving single track”.

But there’s not much else; evidently, the major impetus for mountain biking at the time was getting out into nature, and tooling around country areas on jeep tracks or gravel roads.

Today, we’re spoilt for choice. Want to hit some pretty technical stuff without leaving Cape Town? The new network of single track in Tokai will do just fine. Or drive 30 minutes, and spend hours on the trail network in Tygerberg.

And a little further afield there is Somerset West; or Grabouw, home to the fabulous ‘A-to-Z’ trail. In 1997, Leger informs us, the best part of the Grabouw experience was “a pacey plantation track with a few tightish bends to test your technical skills”. By which he means ‘a road through the forest’.