For adrenalin junkies, hurtling down one of Scotland’s exhilarating mountain bike trails offers high speed action, airborne bumps, dramatic twists, thrills and – unfortunately for some - painful spills.
Now it’s emerged accidents involving bikers who take a tumble while riding the maze of gritty trails at Glentress have given mountain rescue volunteers in the area one of their busiest years on record.
The Peebleshire mountain bike trails have become a hotspot for Tweed Valley Mountain Rescue Team, who are increasingly being called out to work alongside police, ambulance and helicopter crews to extract injured bikers.
The rising number of incidents is thought to be a consequence of the sport’s popularity combined with challenging new routes at Glentress which are catching some unsuspecting riders by surprise.
Although considered to offer some of the exciting bike trails in the country, incidents have ranged from minor bumps to more serious and potentially life-altering limb and head injuries.
Like ski runs, mountain bike trails are graded according to how difficult they are viewed to be: Green (Easy), Blue (Moderate), Red (Difficult), Single Black (Severe), and Double Black (Extreme).
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Forestry and Land Scotland, which operates the Glentress site, describes its Double Black trails as having very fast and steep descents, rapid rate of surface change with “large drop-offs, jumps and unavoidable obstacles that require high levels of skill and commitment”.
It adds that they carry “extreme level of exposure or risk.”
However, weather conditions, erosion and the presence of other riders and obstacles can throw up unexpected challenges for riders, while there is a reliance on riders accepting their own skill and fitness levels.
The rise of e-bikes, meanwhile, has offered some the opportunity to climb to much higher levels than they might otherwise attempt.
So far this year, around half of Tweed Valley Mountain Rescue Team’s 66 call-outs have involved evacuating Glentress bikers.
Usually, the team expects to deal with 50 incidents in an entire year made up of helping hillwalkers, looking for missing and vulnerable people and bike accidents at Glentress and nearby Innerleithen.
In late August, one of a series of Glentress incidents that month, ten members of the mountain rescue team transported an injured biker on a single wheel stretcher uphill to be airlifted by helicopter to hospital.
Posting on social media afterwards, the biker’s father thanked the team and said their efforts had “saved him”.
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That came just 24 hours after the crew had evacuated injured biker, and followed an incident a few days earlier: three in the space of just nine days.
The previous month, a Glentress mountain biker sustained a head injury. It was one of two accidents on the same day in the Borders area that had required a rescue helicopter to attend. The other was a road-related accident.
While in March, the Tweed Valley volunteers faced three ‘overlapping’ callouts for the first time in its history: an injured rider at Glentress, a walker with a leg injury on Tinto Hill and a woman who had fallen unconscious in a Midlothian wood.
The string of Glentress incidents prompted one commentator on Tweed Valley Mountain Rescue Team’s Facebook page to suggest it might change its name to “Glentress Mountain Bike Rescue Team”, adding “if Glentress was a motorsport venue it would have been shut by HSE by now”.
Spokesman for the Tweed Valley Mountain Rescue Team, Paul McGreal, said: “Tweed Valley has a huge trail network, lots of mountain bikers come there and we get incidents. Mountain biking is not without risk.
“There's no question that Glentress became a hot spot this summer. We have been there something like 28 times this year.”
Many call-outs have been to Glentress’s newer trails, which opened around a year ago.
He added: “We don’t know why, but suspect it’s a combination that they are new, they are popular with lots of people riding them, they are of a slightly different character to some other trails, perhaps slightly unexpected.
“The new trails have some bigger bumps. There’s nothing inherently tricky and if you have the skills, it’s fine.
“But we are not here to be risk assessors; we are here to pick up the pieces. And it would be awful world if all the risks were taken away.”
Forestry and Land Scotland opened 16km of new trails at Glentress last year, including a multi-user path as well as mountain biking taster and network trails.
They are part of a £6 million masterplan for the site aimed at attracting more than 350,000 visitors a year to the area and injecting around £1 million into the local economy.
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The next instalment, recently lodged with local planners, features mini mountain bike space, roller area, cornering section and 'drop and tech' zones.
However, the number of mountain bike incidents is said to be placing additional pressure on the mountain team, which operates as a charity and whose members are all volunteers.
Mr McGreal insisted: “We are outdoors people too, and we understand the benefits and risks. The best thing for us is seeing people outdoors enjoying themselves.”
However, he added: “Our operation costs are fairly significant and every callout adds to this; bits of equipment get used or broken.
“It costs £40,000 a year to run the team, and although some is covered by grants from Scottish Government and Police Scotland, we have to raise two-thirds of that ourselves.
“It is putting pressure on us as a team.
“Each call-out means we are leaving family behind, missing family occasions sometimes, leaving workplaces and there’s an impact on employers and people like me who are self-employed.
“It’s of primary importance to us that people continue to come to the hills, they take precautions and don’t do anything stupid but enjoy themselves and enjoy the mountain bike trails because they are fantastic asset.
“And we’re there if it goes wrong.”
According to Scottish Mountain Rescue, so far this year its teams across the country have handled 38 incidents where the main activity was recorded as "Mountain Biking", compared to the previous year's total of 28.
Of this year's figure, Tweed Valley accounted for 29 of the call-outs.
Donald MacRae, Scottish Mountain Rescue Vice-Chair, said: “We recognise the incredible workload Tweed Valley are having this year with mountain bikers. “Volunteer mountain rescue team members are ideally placed to care for such casualties as they hold professional retrieval and medical skills.
“Nationally, over the last few years, mountain rescue teams have witnessed a rise in the range of outdoor pursuits."
A spokesperson for Forestry and Land Scotland, said: "Glentress is our most popular mountain biking destination and has been very busy in the past year. Since September 2023 FLS records show there have been 27 mountain biking accidents recorded at Glentress.
“A significant proportion of these accidents have occurred on our newer blue and red graded trails, developed as part of the Glentress Masterplan, rather than the wider network trails.
"Fun to ride in their own right, these newer trails are also “improver” trails that are used to develop riders’ skill levels.
"It is in the nature of the sport that during this process – and while riders ‘learn’ the new trails – some riders will push beyond their capabilities, make mistakes and have accidents."
He added that the site uses an internationally recognised system to grade trails with clear information for users.
“Skilled, experienced, and qualified staff regularly inspect all of the trails we manage, including those at Glentress, which are maintained to ensure that they are in a safe condition and within the advertised skill grade.
“We liaise closely with the emergency services, investigate all accidents that are reported to us and monitor locations to spot any patterns or trends. We have not encountered any trail condition or issue that is a root cause of any accidents.”
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