It really isn’t too often that we see well-produced mountain bike videos blowing down proper East Coast technical singletrack, so when we do we get pretty excited. We at Bikerumor have strong roots from our start in mountain biking and a couple of decades later still riding the rocky trails of the southern Appalachians, so seeing video like this gives us an especially strong urge to skip out of the office and go test some trail gear.
Scott prefaces their series with the idea of searching for the world’s best singletrack, so we welcome them into our backyard. In this second episode of the Chasing Trail series, their Gstaad-Scott DH team rider Neko Mulally heads into the Great Smokey Mountains to sample they technical western North Carolina trails and get reader for a season of racing.
Check out the unadulterated trail riding after the break, plus a look back at the last episode with Rémy Absalon hammering through Les Vosges singletrack in France…
Mulally spends time in the offseason getting prepped for his European World Cup campaign based out of Brevard, NC. With several friends and his brother/mechanic living there through the winter, it is a great opportunity to train on the wide variety of terrain and trail conditions that the East Coast offers. For this video, he wanted to give a glimpse of the variety of trails that the Smokeys has to offer. It starts with shots in the 10,000 acres of DuPont State Forest, with its techy exposed rock features and well-draining sandy soil. Then just 10 miles away in Pisgah National Forest, you end up with more loamy rough trails that mix in a lot of rock gardens and exposed roots. There they filmed on Farlow Gap, one of the longest descents in the forest, and then head over to Daniel Ridge, a technical descent running along the river and accented by several waterfalls. The shots finish up with the Pilot Rock trail, starting by the Blue Ridge Parkway and dropping through rock gardens into the heart of Pisgah.
The previous episode explored the trails of Les Vosges bordering between French Alsace and Lorraine regions, with French Enduro expert Rémy Absalon.
Check out more on the Chasing Trails project over at: Scott-Sports.com
