Revolution Bike Park 2.0 | A New Beginning (Part 1)

2 part conversation with James from Revolution Bike Park.
Revs has been closed for almost 2 years! and finally this July the park will reopen without an uplift!

Based in the depths of rural North Wales the world famous bike park now has a new pedal up track designed to be the perfect gradient for ebikes. So is this now the ultimate EMTB Bike Park? Lets find out…

For more info and to book your pass now click on the link below:
https://www.revolutionbikepark.co.uk/

you know this last week the amount of rain well huge the rain’s been mental yeah really bad there was one day where I swear I’ve never seen rain any anywhere on this planet as heav and I’ve been in like some right weird places where it pisses it down there’s been many many people over the years that have messaged saying that is my favorite Trail by far on the hill yeah there’s been many even more say it’s absolutely and I can’t ride it dud get nervous on those smaller jumps yeah well I’m I’m one of them yeah sorry I’m just pushing me here buing um H now so if we go through the start three section that’s probably a good SW [Music] to so we’re at the top here of Far Side what other tracks have you got that are now working on this side yeah so this is obviously the the start where everything started from so if we start on this side you got the original far side which you know you got the tables and then the track just it basically runs along where the trees are okay so on one side of track there’s no trees that side was that fairly untouched there or um it’s yeah it’s pretty much untouch the second half it’s still got quite a lot of Brash on it not too much but you know an hour’s work you’d have it you you’d clear it if you know what I mean cuz we’ve we’ve cleared these jumps and then moving over one you’ve got what we used to call The Far Side jumps never came up with a name for it which come off the side I’ve been through that with the machine uhuh um that’s that’s rable now we’ve been riding that so yeah that’s pretty that’s a real nice little bit of session some nice little jumps on it and then here other than this pile of stone for the you just going to make a little start thing for it but we’ve cleared out that used to be poop pip yeah I’m literally forgetting names of it that’s poo pip so that’s cleared down to the first fire Road um so obviously that’s ready and beable in you know in the summer um and it’s actually if anything it’s probably done it good cuz some of it’s like you know where obviously the B there’s so many bites go down it every years and at this top bit of the Hill it’s quite Rocky so there’s not that much soil there so the the the downhill tracks naturally wear down to the Rock but obviously so much stuff’s happened around this area it’s almost put all yeah put all L and crap back over it so left all that kind of on it it’s almost a sort of terrain that that probably benefits from traffic rather than it doing damage if you know what I mean yeah the you know obviously bikes cause wear and tear but they also all hold everything together sure you know you know by the best thing that can happen to these tracks now would be people to ride them yeah you know we’ve got them to a stage where you can’t actually really make them any better yourselves the best the best thing that compacts and packs a trail is bikes going over it in my opinion yeah even you can you know you can do stuff with a digger you can put whacker plates over it um do whatever it’ss it with a shovel a million times and then near enough you put a bike over and it’ll still go down there slightly easiest way to see it isn’t it yeah I see um this give quite a good idea actually I I do a fly down the uh down the 501 line yeah it’s the closest I’ll get to riding it yeah so now I’m really not into that anymore I’ve done most of it but I probably won’t ever ride it again to be fair I mean it works it works it’s you know you just got to crank into them and just hope the best but we’ve changed this first bit now yeah yeah it’s bit more rolly yeah I mean it was always like just so flat here and obviously the trees are all in the way so so I basically dug um dug a drain down the side of it found some decent uh it’s real hard digging here cuz there’s no it’s flat there’s no way of making big piles of stuff it’s right pain do you have to bring material up here well even that’s just a pain in US in itself do you know what I mean you need someone else you need a dumper you need a big dumper to make any difference so I ended up just digging a all here okay basically nice basically um and trying to you know build this start up a little bit yeah um so you got rid of the old start ramp yeah cuz I mean it’s been rotten for years so yeah so it makes makes the approach a bit easier then yeah yeah yeah like now you can you know you’ve got a crank to get going okay but as soon as you’ve done that step down like obviously if you’re going to ride 50 you’re not going to roll like you’re going to jump it and uh you’re away yeah and same with free ride you know you can roll it or if you jump it you can then end up like scrubbing over that roller and then you’re into you know the the the first jumps redone the whole of the whole of the free ride this top section sorry not not the whole way down but this top okay finished that last week nice and yeah we’ve been riding it and really really good fun like I’ve not like I said not ridden that much and to get in and just ride some smaller jumps like that it was so much fun nice and then we were obviously just lapping it riding back up on E Bike you know you can get quite a lot of laps in on this top section you know rather than you know that’s how I see it kind of working from now on is we spent an hour just riding up here nice and you get so so much in in that short space of time almost more than an uplift well if you’re not losing that gradient like if you’re still staying fairly High it takes so much less energy to get back up it takes less less power my ebike is ancient it’s one at first Canyon one was what came out is literally four it’s ancient four years old like a spectral or something yeah but there’s like three two or three different versions of it since yeah yeah it’s first or second generation Shimano m a 500 WT battery do you know what I mean like things have moved on you know better than I do how much of the bikes have moved on now so I base everything on what I do on mine I’m all right cuz I’ve got four batteries hang on a minute so so it don’t actually make that much difference I’ve got like 2,000s if I don’t have to carry them so I could ride here all day there you go you heard it here first you need four batteries to ride r i was we made that original Three ride line like years ago we didn’t actually know that much about building Trails kind of things and and to be fair it’s a decent Trail people really lik it look there’s a trail Builder there’s a lot of lot of floors in it okay and one of the things is that section down there it’s too steep there’s not enough room I feel like this area now is like this is almost the second area that that You’ be able to session okay you know like anyone who’s Vision Line knows you know how easy it is to get from the bottom of it back here if you’re going to you know if you’re going to lap it push it up and lap it it’s it’s not far at all is it no you know So the plan is you know we’ve started this other line above where the red was so in the middle of winter when I was repairing all the roads that basically just had two massive ruts down here where the forwarders have been going up and down so I thought I’d just quickly go down in this machine and just level it off mhm just so in the future we could come back and at least would be able to drive on it and you know it’d be a start to making it easier to get in it back to being a bik trail but what I quickly realized when I got onto it on the machine is that there was so much stuff so much crap on it yeah and that if I just like leveled top of it and tracked it in like to then go back in the future it would have been an absolute nightmare to deal with what was basically hidden underneath just a few inches of dirt so because it was like their main hall Road getting the getting the timber onto a more substantial track they they layer it with Brash so I’m like I had to do it do a like a proper cleanup yeah and there was that much stuff that I couldn’t just pile it on side if I pile it on side it’ have filled halfway like all the way up to it Vision probably there’s literally that much of it so the only way to deal with that kind of stuff is burying it the main thing is I’ve got rid of the stuff all the banks are clear the stumps are gone um it’s basically piled up with amazing dirt just waiting for me to go through it what have you had to do to Vision to keep it going were they fairly fairly sympathetic when it came to this Trail yeah so the one of the kind of good things about the bigger lines we’ve built is that we’ve obviously already taken a few trees out around them and they’re that big that you can kind of get to them from either side yeah so obviously this road they’ve got so they didn’t need to they could just reach and grab a few Without Really damaging too much and then the ones above the vision um they actually so the red down Hill used to run just above it and that got completely destroyed and basically they made that into some kind of access road so then they they could reach down from there to get the trees above Vision without damaging it yeah or damaging it too much so a lot of it’s just natural um wear and tear I started it was a couple of weeks ago now basically did the first couple just with the machine a lot of the kind of hand workk cuz this kind of stuff you I don’t know you got to be a little bit more precise i’ say and also we like you know it looks better don’t it when it’s all proper shaped up this line yeah so yeah we went to town on it shapes all lips and everything there’s a probably another four or five days work on it just a bit more Digger work really just to get it fully finished but it’s been ridden been ridden for we um started tighten everything up right so we know it still rolls rolls well everything still works but like I say it just needs a bit of love to get it back to its former glory kind of thing I mean from here it looks pretty insane already yeah yeah I mean like when it’s all done it’s going to look pretty mental is it yeah yeah it look pretty good it’s so cool in the open as well like I mean it it was cool in the trees and whenever you in the Autumn when all the need fell and it just turned orange that was stunning wasn’t it yeah it was yeah that was real was a really good time yeah I always thought that was the best time here if you got that like October time when all the needles are down yeah and you got them random not really nice days they obviously weren’t that warm but they were some of best days to ride on this hill I think I I guess at least without the trees there it will dry out quicker like the trails will dry quicker those I these weren’t too bad in the first place it always drives quite fast this hill anyway I see sure like a lot of um you know this last week the amount of rain well huge the rain’s been mental yeah really bad there was one day where I swear I’ve never seen rain any anywhere on this planet as ever and I’ve been in like some right weird places where it pisses it down like it was crazy I’m much water fell out of the ground and then it stops raining come back here and you’d expect it to be a swamp yeah yeah it’s drying out and the dirt is just so good yeah like amazing like me and Dave when we were doing some of these like lips and stuff like that I’ve kind of mixed up the material with with a machine and then you know we’ I’ve roughly shaped it and then bom we’ve gone in by hand and we’re like this dirt is just mental how good it is like and even down like where I’m working now on the Free Ride I was just like this dirt is just I don’t think you get better dirt because obviously we need stuff that runs all year you know these drums as you anyone know they they ride the same in the wet you know so you can ride these in the middle of winter and that’s to do with like we mix like the clay with the like the sh more Shale stuff okay so it’s kind of half and half half clay half Rock sometimes so then on the on this side of the track then uh to the right of vision what’s the plan there so that used to be Revit um which is basically been annihilated none of that is there’s a few random bits you can see poking out of the brat and crap yeah um so that’s basically out of the picture for the time being but they’ve open obviously with there no trees there the land been opened up so you can get to see it a bit more it’s such a I mean I always knew that was a really good spot to like build something through but like now it would be yeah you could really build something good in there now it never really got much traffic did it it was a bit of NE it too hard you know we we’ve riding Everyone likes something slightly slightly different don’t it you know I’ve there’s been many many people over the years that have messaged saying that is my favorite Trail by far on the hill yeah there’s been many even more say it’s absolutely and I can’t ride it so you know it was hard to get through it or it was hard it was just hard work yeah sure it’s a working like you really have to work to get through it so you know it was it was very different from everything else we had on the hill and that’s you know basically what we wanted to do this is what I will l meant to do with life I was suppos supposed to build B jails I love it I absolutely love doing it and hate it sometimes but you can’t love some without hating it can you if you enjoyed this video please like And subscribe on the way outs and look out for more episodes of the emtb podcast coming very soon