The glacier-shaped Norwegian landscape is unique and stunningly beautiful. It can be labelled as the Great Outdoors of Europe. But what about mountain biking in this rugged terrain?
There are numerous great MTB-spots. In the Telemark in Southern Norway you can ride for miles on smooth granite rock and several skiing resorts have remodeled their slopes into bike parks in summertime. There is a cool app for the smart phone called trailguide.no, that shows all the MTB-spots and helps you navigating the routes.
We chose Ål in Hallingdal as our MTB-hot spot. Ål is about half way between Bergen and Oslo and it hosts the Hillbilly Huckfest, a big air event, in July. Knut, the organizer of the Hillbilly Huckfest, helped us to hit some of Ål’s MTB-trails. So we gave the Hillbilly Enduro Trail literally a trial. Knut drove us up the hill to a place called Nyset where we hiked our bikes up for about 15 minutes to cross Nysetfjellet and to gradually descent back to Ål.
Due to the rain on the previous days the trail was in fact a creek in some sections. And with the trillions of rocks the trail was quite challenging. After a while we found our flow while the trail was still soaked. On one of the ladders across a swampy spot I lost balance and had to step off the pedal with the consequence of wet and cold feet for the rest of the ride.
All in all we had a cool 15 km long trail adventure that encompassed most of the typical Norwegian characteristics: lots of rocks and water, natural beauty, really nice people & fun. Skål.
allmountaindinger's mountain bike meccas 