Most mountain bikers are riding unsanctioned or illegal trails on a regular basis, with loamers, footpaths and ‘cheeky’ stuff all fair game, according to our latest poll on Facebook. That’ll probably come as no surprise given that you probably do it too – nearly half of us are going out of our way to specifically target this kind of riding, and 74% of respondents said they went off-piste on most rides.

Meanwhile, only 18% of respondents said they almost never hit up the skidders, with just 2% saying they kept it “strictly legal”. The remaining 6% said they split their rides between legal and unsanctioned stuff. It’s not the biggest survey of its kind, with less than 200 respondents, but the results do seem to tally with the experiences of my riding friends… and yours too I’ll bet. 

Are we all guilty of trespassing?

Look at those figures another way, and it shows that only 2% of riders restrict themselves to the legal stuff, while a whopping 98% of people are prepared to admit they’re effectively guilty of trespass. We couch these trails with words like “cheeky” or “off-piste”, but the fact is they’re illegal to ride because you’re on someone else’s land.

Riders don’t dwell on it, they tread carefully, walk themselves off the hill when injured, close gates, watch out for dogs, say hi cheerily and smile politely… but they’re breaking the law. What that says about our sport is something very serious, which is that there really are underlying problems with land access, and it’s got to change. Guy Kesteven made a similar argument in his column, ‘Off-piste trails: Reckless vandalism, or the future of MTB?’ a few years ago. So this is not a new subject, and it doesn’t look like it’s going away any time soon, either.

It’s not just a UK problem

Morzine brought the issue into the headlines last month when it seemed like the best of Le Pleney’s famous off-piste trails were to close. It’s a hill that’s probably as important to mountain biking as the Bernabau is to football – the best riders in the world ride here still, as do thousands of Brits who like to scare the bejesus out of themselves on the steeps.

It didn’t stop the local mayor’s office and the new lift operators threatening fines for anyone caught riding a section of the steeps though, effectively closing two sections of the hill. The thing is though, those trails were never “open” in the first place, they’ve always been illegal and the town of Morzine and its surrounding villages have traditionally turned a blind eye to the ‘singles’ snaking down the hill, as they call them.

We’re told by Atlas Ride Co, which runs holidays in the area, that most of the steeps are still good to ride without threat of losing hundreds of euros to the police, but it leaves Morzine in a tricky position. Does it tell riders they can now ride the illegal trails, by making them legal? Bring them under its wing, ask locals to manage the risk, repair and upgrade the best ones and help close the really sketchy ones that were reportedly causing flooding? Or does it carry on burying its head in the sand and let mountain bikers tackle some of them, and arbitrarily declare the others zone interdit? We’re not sure yet, but it looks like the mountain bike community there is looking to adopt as many as 10 steeps into the bike park proper eventually, which has got to be the right way to approach land access from mountain bikers. 

Why do we break the rules?

Just why are riders drawn to ride illegal trails in the first place though? Simple, they’re more fun, more exhilarating and less predictable than 99% of sanctioned stuff. A big part of mountain biking for lots of people is finding that razor edge between control and crashing, and trying to stay on it for as long and as fast as possible. Away from the bike parks, I can’t think of many bridleways that thrill riders as much as the steep zigzags the kids have scratched into an unloved hillside that almost certainly exists somewhere near you.

Most riders don’t tackle them at busy times, to avoid unsettling walkers and other trail users, they close gates, play nice and say hi. But they’re not prepared to accept that all that’s open to them are half a dozen boring fireroads or gentle stretches of singletrack. Most bridleways in England and Wales do not have the same thrill, and those that do are in the remotest parts of the UK, hundreds of miles from where anyone actually lives. The totally legal route around Helvellyn, that takes in Sticks Pass, for example, is a wicked ride and I love it… but no one from the South East is doing a 15 hour round trip to ride that every weekend.

Common sense and hard work pays dividends when given the chance

I don’t think it has to be this way though, because there are parts of the world where most people do ride the legal stuff. I’m talking principally about Scotland and the Golfie, where trail groups like the TVTA have successfully established stewardship over tracks that used to be proscribed.  It’s more easily done there of course, thanks to that enlightened country’s right to roam laws, that allow bikes access to most trails going. It’s not a free for all, and digging your own trail into the hill is as dodgy there as it is in England, but it’s showing us the way.

The reason then most people ride illegal trails in England and Wales is that there just aren’t enough of the good quality sanctioned ones. Take the Surrey Hills for example, the biggest hotspot for riding in the country according to Strava and Trailforks. But it’s about as ambiguous as it gets in terms of trail access, and the handful of sanctioned trails there can’t possibly contain the thousands upon thousands of riders who head there every week.

Mountain bikers don’t NEED to ride illegal trails of course, these are very much first world problems. We’re not using their e-bikes to pick up emergency food and medicine, instead we’re larking about and satisfying that itch for the lovely endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin the body kicks out when we ride. But until we get better trail access, until all trails are legitimised for bikes, and until landowners allow us to manage the trails properly, there will always be cheeky tracks in the woods.

Without trespass, we wouldn’t have the current trail network

What do we need to do then? Just stopping riding illegal trails is not going to work because of the sheer weight of numbers, with 4.1 million mountain bikers in the UK you couldn’t close a SWAT box without someone chainsawing it open again. Besides, most people don’t want to stop riding the illegal stuff. As a wise man once wrote, the law is an ass. And isn’t this how land reform has traditionally been done in England, starting with the mass trespass on Kinder Scout back in 1932, when a dozen hill walkers refused to be cowed by local land barons. It’s a mantle picked up in the present day by campaigners on Dartmoor, who successfully argued that multimillionaire hedge fund manager Alexander Darwall shouldn’t be allowed to fence off 4,000-acres of land and overturn our right to wild camp on the land.

Nope, what we need to do is go at it from the other end. Groups like the UK Mountain Bike Trail Alliance, DMBINs, and the UK Trails Project need to be better empowered to encourage mountain bikers and land owners to talk to one another, and accept that mountain bikers aren’t going anywhere. And most importantly, we need more trails that are better maintained, we need proper investment from the government and acceptance of our sport as one of the most popular and important in the UK.

I want the general public to recognise the good we do for the countryside too. No one I know drops litter, hooks dog poo bags onto branches, or revs a two-stroke up a quiet country path. In fact we’re one of the principal trail user groups actually picking up the stuff, working alongside groups like Trash Free Trails. We’re one of the hardest working and most proactive trail user groups out there, always happy to fix drainage and clear fallen tress. And who here hasn’t helped push a car out of a snow-filled ditch, or headed out in search of a lost dog? That’s mountain bikers, right there; we’re a force to be harnessed for the good of the outdoors, and that deserves some respect.