WILD SOUTH WEST
If you let Joel Anderson and his brother Isaac take you for a tour of the local, you’ll be in for more than a sedate pedal around the Quantocks
We spend an adrenaline-fuelled day with brothers Joel and Isaac Anderson, riding – alright, watching them ride – insane lines in their local woods at Triscombe, in Somerset’s picturesque Quantock Hills.
You slammed so hard into the bank on the other side, it was a horrible crash,” laughs Joel Anderson, looking across at his older brother. “I remember you standing up and spitting out bits of tooth!”“Yeah, I had to get them concreted back in,” replies Isaac, grinning to reveal a pristine set of pearly whites and giving us the overwhelming impression that, to this pair, losing your front teeth in an attempt to launch across a 40ft canyon isn’t a sign to rein it in, but merely an inconvenient part of the learning process.
We’re stood in what must be the heart of the Quantock Hills, halfway down a wooded, steep-sided valley. From the lip of a step-up lander Joel is gesturing up the line of the river, describing the maddest stunt that he and the other South West boys have come up with in the 15 years or so they’ve been riding here. “I’ve seen so many people case it and go over the bars,” he says. “Someone G’d out and fell right in the hole, someone else snapped their carbon bar. It’s probably not surprising that the Forestry Commission got rid of it,” he concludes pragmatically, despite a mischievous glint in his eye telling us that he’s probably already on the lookout for something bigger.
TOTALLY KILLING IT
If you’re not familiar with the name, Joel is one of a select group of rising new-school talents – a guy whose willingness to launch himself off properly huge stuff is backed up by a fair helping of skill. He’s the kind of rider that, when you see a new video pop up online, you know you have to click on it. In fact, it was a web edit titled F**k you get pumped that brought Joel to our attention, five years ago. And from the first clips of him slinging it round a turn showering the camera with roost and then throwing a backflip into a manual, we knew we should sit up and take notice. Since then, the now 23-year-old has gone on to win whip-off comps, smoke the competition in pretty much every DH race he’s entered (not that you’d ever call him a serious racer) and is one of only a handful of riders worldwide who can say they’ve made it through Nico Vink’s monster-sized LooseFest XL jump line.
Today we’re back where it all began – in Joel’s local woods, Triscombe, and he and his brother are giving us
JOEL IS ONE OF A SELECT GROUP OF RISING NEW SCHOOL TALENTS, WITH A WILLINGNESS TO LAUNCH HIMSELF OFF PROPERLY HUGE STUFF
a private tour of their choicest trails (‘choice’ is a matter of opinion, depending on your level of self-preservation instinct). The day kicks off with a run down one of their fresh-cut berm tracks. We opt to stand by the sidelines as Isaac and then Joel proceed to launch themselves, literally, into the first turn. Fully compressing up to their axles in the soft dirt, both of them faceplant at least twice into the banking, until their tyres pack in a hard enough groove to keep the wheels rolling. Pedals foot-deep in the loam and bars scraping the verge, both brothers go at it full throttle, running back up for more until they’ve railed it as low and fast as humanly possible.
“It gets dangerous when we start doing mates' races,” states Isaac, picking chunks of mud out of his bar ends. “Especially in the dry. We had one mate who threw himself across the finish line just to get the fastest time!” Joel and Isaac’s crew are a tight-knit bunch who all met way back when at the same primary school and are still mucking around on bikes together today. “We had one mate called James who was a bit older than us,” Isaac recalls. “All of us rode hardtails back then, but James had an Orange 222 and he could do all the biggest jumps. I remember when Joel was about 10 he saw him ride and he was like, ‘I want that guy to come to my birthday party!’”
TRISCOMBE TRICKS
As well as their solid group of mates, Isaac and Joel have their dad to thank for getting them into riding, plus they grew up in the right place at the right time. “We lived just over the hill when the Triscombe scene really kicked off,” explains Joel. “We’d go up there every week and it felt like there was a new track to ride each time. But we hated pushing, so when we moved to the next valley over, Dad bought an old caravan to make into an uplift trailer. He ripped the top off, cut in slots for the wheels and we strapped the bikes in with bungees. It started as something for us and a few mates, but then I made a Facebook page and suddenly there were 2,000 people who wanted to come and ride!”
Although mountain biking is permitted at Triscombe, the Forestry Commission’s relationship with the riders has had its ups and downs, and their willingness to turn a blind eye to new tracks has been tested at times. “The ranger comes round quite often to check we’re not building anything too dangerous,” says Joel. “I remember one time we’d just finished this track called ‘Techno Tony’ that’s got lots of big jumps between really tight trees, and while he was saying, ‘That looks pretty safe and well-built, boys’, I was bricking it about actually riding it! To this day, I think I’m the only one who’s made it through a whole run clean!”
As we move on, we notice a definite theme to Joel and Isaac’s trails, in that none is straightforward to ride. For our next stop, we leave the rutted bracken turns behind and head deeper into the pines, to where a rhythmed set of gaps over planting furrows leads into a decent-sized fireroad step-down. It looks like your wheels would barely have time to touch down on the lander before you’d need to yank up to clear the fireroad, and then on landing that – into slick roots, we might add – there’d only be milliseconds to compose the bike, line it up straight and dive through the narrow tree gap on exit. “Joel’s really annoying when it comes to guinea-pigging jumps,” says Isaac, seeing our open mouths as his sibling floats a casual
sideways whip across the gap first time. “When we build something I’m usually like, 'hmm, it doesn’t look quite right', and then he’ll do it perfectly. After that I’ve got to do it!” “Just don’t think too much about it!” laughs Joel, pushing back up for round two.
E-ASY DOES IT
It’s impossible not to be impressed by Joel’s seemingly effortless bike-handling abilities. A couple of years ago, he was snapped up to ride for Specialized UK, and he’s spent a good amount of his time since working through their range of 29er trail bikes and e-bikes, demonstrating just how easy they are to throw around. Recently, the Big S gave Joel a Turbo Kenevo and a chunk of cash, and let him loose in a field to build whatever he wanted. “Obviously someone who knows more about diggers than me operated the machinery, but I pretty much had free rein to do anything,” explains Joel, talking us through his vision. This is probably best described as a 4X-meets-supercross track/skate park, complete with sideways transfers, whoops and even a big dirt quarter pipe. “What’s it like doing all that stuff on a 25kg e-bike?” we ask. “Well, I’ve never been one for pedalling up hills, so I love it!” he replies. “The weight is low so you don’t notice it and, if anything, you can just lean off it even harder in the air. Plus because it’s got a motor to get me back to the top, we did what would’ve been a week-long project in just two days!”
The brothers may have embraced e-bikes, at least for some of their riding, but it’s clear that the raw DIY spirit of MTB is still alive and well in the Quantocks. Joel and Isaac’s love of pushing their limits on bikes is infectious. And even if the idea of riding what they come up with is intimidating for most of us, it’s rad to see the brothers and their crew of like-minded mates getting their hands dirty. Sometimes they might stack it, sometimes they’ll get away by the skin of their teeth, but they’ll always finish with a story to tell and a big grin (even if it is missing a few teeth!).
“WHEN WE BUILD SOMETHING I’M USUALLY LIKE, 'HMM, IT DOESN’T LOOK QUITE RIGHT', AND THEN HE’LL DO IT PERFECTLY”