Brave Peak Bike Park
A trail-building adventure in China
Beyond the challenge of carving the bike park’s trails by hand, builders also had to contend with bureaucracy. That China’s Brave Peak park was made at all might just have come down to good fortune. “It really helped that the eldest villager’s daughter works in Toronto and that I am Canadian,” said lead trail designer Keith Williams, a Victoria native. “It was kind of lucky.”
Early this year, Chinese pro rider Ding Zaigang and Williams appeared in a six-minute video about the making of Brave Peak, located in China’s rural Zhejiang province, five hours south of Shanghai. The film is part of a 35-video Youtube series, Encountersin China, created for China’s 70th anniversary. While the film does document the building of the park, which opened in 2017, it doesn’t cover the whole story.
When Williams moved to China in 2009 for a teaching job, he began posting mountain biking videos on Youku (Chinese Youtube) and Weibo (Twitter). Through the Internet grapevine, a Fox Racing distributor reached out to Williams about working on a bike park.
In late 2015, a car was sent. Williams and his dog travelled for hours on a onelane road to Xia Bao, population 2,000. “We arrived in the middle of night and the next day I met the villagers,” he said. “We hiked the mountain that had no roads or trails. It was so steep; it was like climbing a ladder.” Williams was the first foreigner to meet the local officials and farmers.
Once the project was approved, he had carte blanche. “It’s not like in Canada or North America where you need environmental assessments,” he said. “You can do whatever you want. We practically tore down the mountain.” That’s not to say bureaucracy didn’t interfere. The government eventually wanted an environmental assessment, then changed its mind. Instead, trees were planted. “You can’t plant trees in clay without watering them. They all died,” Williams recalled.
Beyond the political hurdles, the mountain was unruly. Originally, they pushed their bikes up three hours to the top, then hacked trees with machetes, marking trails. Then came the rain. “We tried to build one of our first lines in a crevice between two hills and it turned into a river after a heavy rainfall. We lost part of the mountain,” he said. Six months of construction were gone in a weekend. “We learned to build trails on top of the ridges.”
The other concern: a death-defying, incredibly steep descent. “We clocked people with a radar gun at 85–90 km/h. The top is like a corkscrew – the inside of the corner is vertical. We had to rebuild the top of the mountain three times to get it right because it had these huge 2-m-tall berms. I’ve ridden it for years, and I’m still scared at the top,” he said.
Williams said it’s not a hill for beginners, but some pump tracks have been added. To attract visitors, a nearby pillow factory became a hotel with restaurants. The hotel is quite nice he adds, but it’s rural China: “You can hear the pigs being slaughtered at 6 a.m. in the morning.”
Other people have approached Williams to work on other potential trails. One park near Brave Peak, the Hangzhou International Bike Park, has plans for a gondola and restaurants. But without formal council approvals, Williams isn’t holding out hope that construction will start anytime soon.
As of early February, Williams was contemplating a return to Canada because of the covid-19 outbreak. He was less afraid of the virus than of unemployment. “I haven’t left my house for days,” he said. “I need to work.”
“You can do whatever you want. We practically tore down the mountain.”