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Best Tech Trails Outside of the Whistler Bike Park

These remote tech trails in the Whistler Valley are so much tighter and jankier than the lines you'll find in the bike park!

Mountain Biking Severe, Extreme

Photo: Greg Heil

Description

When most mountain bikers visit Whistler, they inevitably fixate on shredding laps in the bike park. And who can blame them? Whistler is home to the most famous bike park on Planet Earth, with world-class jump lines and tech trails. You can easily spend days on end exploring all of the myriad lines and features spread across the slopes of Whistler Mountain.

But Whistler's mountain bike scene has so much more to offer than just the bike park. If you're on the hunt for gnarly tech trails, you might have better luck—and even find more challenging trails—if you turn your gaze outside the bike park.

While yes, you can find some burly trails in the bike park, the technical lines in trail systems such as the Whistler Westside and those found on Blackcomb mountain are tighter, just as technical, usually more exposed, and very demanding. In fact, the trails in the bike park have to conform to much more rigorous safety and design standards due to the massive amount of traffic they receive and the liability requirements for the resort. Many of the OG lines outside of the park were originally renegade lines that were built without consulting anyone resembling a lawyer. You never quite know what you'll get into when you drop into one of Whistler's more remote lines, and this combination of the unknown and awkward jank makes for some impressively-challenging trails!

In this guidebook, you'll find a checklist of some of the best technical trails in the Whistler Valley that aren't in the bike park. Now granted, one of these rides—Top of the World -> Khyber Pass Epic—begins and ends in the park, but the technical masterpiece is actually located outside of the park boundaries. But that's the only route on this list served by a lift. The rest will require you to do the hard work to get to the top, but they'll all reward you with delightful, challenging, bone-crushing tech trail descending!

And this guidebook is just a highlights reel. It's impossible to list all of the incredibly challenging singletrack masterpieces found in the Whistler Valley because not only is the vast majority of the trails here absurdly technical, but the locals just don't stop—they keep building more!

Routes included

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