There’s no denying it: rocks, roots and hard-packed dirt are less forgiving to land on than 20 centimetres of powder, even if it’s of the West Coast concrete variety.
That’s likely part of the reason the Whistler Mountain Bike Park’s 2012 injury rate of about five accidents per 1,000 rider days, according to data published by the Vancouver Sun that year, was more than double the 2.4 accidents per 1,000 visits Whistler Blackcomb cited for skiers and snowboarders.
Most of those bike park incidents involved “fairly minor injuries,” a Whistler Blackcomb spokesperson said at the time.
The mountain operator no longer shares injury rates publicly. Although Whistler Mountain Bike Park senior manager Pierre Ringuette usually relates that statistic to the number of patrol call-outs—“so any type of injury, or sometimes even just a call to a flat tire”—he estimated the resort is “pretty much on par to where we were previously.”
The resort aims to mitigate those call-outs with education, Ringuette said Friday morning, July 23, while behind the wheel of a pickup making its way down Whistler Mountain’s gravel access roads.
“I wouldn’t say that there’s one group that’s more apt to hurting themselves over another. It’s all about decision-making,” he said.
“Inexperienced riders will go into something not knowing that they weren’t ready for it, and they panic and lock something up, but a lot of the times injuries happen due to complacency. Good riders don’t typically hurt themselves when they’re in the moment, and really focused on paying attention to what they need to do. It’s when they arrive onto that green or blue run out that they just become complacent.”
So yes, downhill mountain biking has its risks. It’s also a blast.
With that in mind, there are a wide range of initiatives and messaging underway at Whistler Blackcomb aimed at helping guests strike the right balance between stoke and safety. Ringuette shared a few of them when he brought Pique on a tour through the bike park last week for a first-hand look at how Whistler Blackcomb is approaching on-mountain safety this summer.
Progression
Whether you’re used to shredding A-Line or gearing up for your first-ever ride down a beginner trail, Ringuette recommends starting your day with a warm-up lap. It’s part of the pre-, re- and free-ride mentality Whistler Blackcomb promotes.
The resort released a detailed Whistler Mountain Bike Park Orientation Guide in 2015 that it encourages all bikers to check out before heading up the lift. It includes an ability level guide and a trail progression scale that lays out a reccommended route, beyond the standard green circle, blue square, black diamond classifications.
A massive, blown-up version is one of the first sights guests will see upon entering the rental outlet at the base of the Whistler Village Gondola, but it’s also available online, and near the Whistler Village Gondola’s midstation terminal. A bike guide usually stationed at the top of the the bike park's Fitzsimmons Zone serves as another resource to direct guests to the appropriate trails for their ability.
Resort staff frequently tout the benefits of a lesson, particularly the $250 Intro to Bike Park package that includes a lift ticket, equipment rentals, and a three-hour lesson with a certified instructor who will run first-timers through the basic techniques.
“We know from the winter our guest satisfaction scores are better from a guest who’s been with an instructor than somebody who’s just experiencing it on their own,” said Ringuette.
“We know that they’re having a safer time if they have that guidance.”
The same can be said for equipment. While any bike with functioning rear and front brakes is technically allowed in the park, riders will undoubtedly have a better experience on a well-maintained, dual suspension rig intended to tackle the trails.
Trail maintenance
These days, those downhill-specific bikes are designed to roll over pretty much any rock, root, or other obstacle with ease. In other words, on-trail hazards are part of the fun. Still, the patrol team’s days in the bike park start much like they do in the winter.
“We check all the trails by zone as we open up,” Ringuette explained. The first crew up is always patrol. After their morning meeting, “they descend through certain zones and they do trail checks, where they’re looking for a few different things, like whether the signage is all up, the right ropes to deflect people from taking the wrong turn, or closed signs up if they need to be.”
Ringuette admitted the trail crew is currently “pretty focused” on preparing the brand-new 1199 downhill trail in Creekside for the upcoming Canadian Open DH race, set to take place during Crankworx, “but we’re still addressing all of the needs in the rest of the park," he said.
Trail, patrol and bike school crews all use the Trello project-management app to track shared priorities, he explained. For example, “Bike School might say, ‘There’s a big hole on Crank It Up that’s eating up tires,’ and we don’t want that to get worse, so that’s where we go, ‘That’s top priority, we’ll go do that first thing this morning before we go do anything else.’”
Weather
As in winter, trail crews need to adapt their approach to Mother Nature’s whims.
“We have challenges with either trying to repair things when it’s too dry or too wet,” Ringuette said. “When it’s too dusty, you need moisture for the dirt to pack, so they can’t really do much maintenance.” That said, repurposed snowmaking irrigation systems “really help us sometimes to make fixes,” he explained.
In extreme situations, crews will also close steep trails that are super wet, muddy and prone to erosion, “for people’s safety and also protection of the trail,” said Ringuette. As for the dry days, irrigation systems installed on a few of the bike park's busiest trails work to keep trails damp and prevent braking bumps from forming.
Summer also brings another hazard that some riders might be familiar with, if their attempts to upload were interrupted last week: lightning.
As the resort shared in an Instagram post earlier this month, protocols require staff to swing into action whenever a strike is recorded within 100 kilometres of the resort. “We react with a phased approach that prioritizes mitigating risk from higher elevations downward. Our approach differs depending on how far away the most recent strike was,” the post read. Strikes at 100 km, 60 km, 30 km and 20 km carry different operational implications, ranging from putting Peak Chair on stand-by and pausing gondola uploads from the Valley, to terrain sweeps and encouraging guests to take shelter indoors.
Lift construction
If you've walked through Skiers Plaza recently, you've probably already noticed the shiny new Fitzsimmons Express chairlift terminal that now stands at the base of Whistler Mountain.
Construction on the lift replacement is about one week ahead of schedule, Ringuette said as he drove past the top of the Fitz lift Friday, where work on the top terminal was continuing next to midstation. Work on that terminal should wrap up by Aug. 1, he added.
In the meantime, bike park regulars might notice a few new barriers or redirected trails compared to previous summers. There’s also a new bottom section of the Singing Pass hiking trail winding its way up through the trees, as Ringuette pointed out, while Whistler Blackcomb had several staff members serving as flaggers stationed at new crossings within in the construction zone during the first few weekends of summer ops. But crews have so far managed to limit construction’s impacts on the bike park, he said: “For the most part, we haven’t had to close too many trails."
Still, “I didn’t sleep much in March,” he added with a laugh.
