CHRIS MALONEY AKA KEEPER OF THE PEAK

Chris Maloney's Twitter account is an invaluable pre-ride news hub for Peak District mountain bikers and with his wider advocacy work he's also connecting people together to change UK mountain biking for good

- Sim Mainey

Mountain bikers love social media. Whether it’s posting our big achievements or watching epic fails, blogging, vlogging, commenting, tweeting or ‘gramming has become part of, not just mountain biking, but our lives. But how can we use these platforms to do more than just like, comment and share our rides, and actually improve our rides?

Chris Maloney wouldn’t claim to have the definitive answer to that question, but he’s shown what’s possible. You might know Chris better by his Twitter handle, Keeper of the Peak (@KoftheP), a tongue-in-cheek name he adopted thanks to social media.

“I was on a mountain bike forum and someone was asking for route advice. They were looking to go over Cut Gate [one of the Peak District’s most well-loved trails], it was April and it’d been raining and I said ‘Ah, you might not want to go up there as it’s a bit of a mess. You won’t have a very pleasant ride and it’ll cause a bit of damage as well’. They responded with ‘Who died and made you keeper of the peak?’, and I thought there was something in that.”

Rather than get involved in an online argument, as many of us would have done, Chris decided to set up a Twitter account to help mountain bikers plan their rides around the Peak District, and call it Keeper of the Peak. “I thought it would be great if there was a central resource for people to find trail information so it was always readily available. I thought Twitter was the best way of doing that. Not only is it so alive and easily accessible but it also forces you to be concise. So the information is always bitesize.”

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