FURTHER INFO
a bicycle or having an espresso in a bar at the end of the descent.
Stone King Rally has set the template for everything that follows. Trails have been cleared and the idea is to funnel riders down them in the years ahead to keep them from being absorbed back into the landscape. This in turn, it is hoped, will lead people through the towns and villages where they’ll spend their hard-earned cash. These places will in turn see the value in mountain biking, so give something back by increasing their efforts to support riding, and the cycle continues…
A culture of funding trail maintenance is rare in mountain biking – ‘no dig, no ride’ being a common phrase bandied about – but look to snowsports and you have people paid to groom pistes, why can’t we enjoy the same in mountain biking? Look at Stone King Rally’s online shop and you’ll find the digital guide behind a paywall. Why? Because that money goes directly back into the trails. That digital guide will send you beyond the Stone King Rally website and to countless vendors of whatever service you might require en route. This is no Booking.com – Ash takes no cut – but another attempt to promote a bike-centric commercial ecosystem. Clearly, then, anyone looking to make big bucks isn’t going to wind up an event organiser.
Mountain biking is likely to see the largest growth in outdoor sports in coming years and that all means more demand, and if there isn’t the infrastructure and information in place to seamlessly allow an increase in traffic, then nobody wins. Gone is the route-guarding of Trans-provence, where the places passed through were merely names on a map.
This will be a massive year for the wider Stone King project. The inaugural edition represented a proof of concept, which many, mostly at municipality level, understood and rightly got behind.
Like Trans-provence that went before it, Stone King in its broadest sense is meant to be
Visit stonekingrally.org for more information and to visit the Stone King online shop to access the full digital guide to the route (€39). Everything bought from Stone King online shop goes straight back into funding the projects that fall under the Stone King umbrella.
a gift to the world of mountain biking.
As its predecessor defined the genre that is the multi-day enduro mountain bike race, Stone King aims to pave the way for mountain biking to become self-fulfilling in every way.if Stone King can be to mountain bike eco-tourism what Trans-provence was to multi-day racing, then we will hopefully see a protracted spread of coordinated, connected efforts between user and provider, far beyond the valleys of Monte Viso.
THIS WILL BE A MASSIVE YEAR FOR THE STONE KING PROJECT