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Esher Shore
24th May 2006 - Dud
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Last week my university's mountain bike club hit Esher Shore for a day of ladders and dirt jumping. Some of the guys had never ridden north shore before and were pretty reluctant to accept that it could be anywhere near as fun as downhill. At around 12 we rolled up to the sight of perfectly crafted lines of dirt jumps…
Esher Shore is set in a very upmarket area of Surrey right next to a proper posh racecourse. The day we went was sunny, hot and pretty perfect. After getting registered and signed in, Rob (Rob Cole, Banshee/Mythic Team Rider) opened the gates to the shore. The place was empty and lines of shore split off in every direction. The lines themselves are graded on difficulty to cater for beginners and experts alike. Blue are the low trails and are usually narrower and quite tech but there's never far to fall. The red trails step it up a level and contain gaps, off camber landings, and drops. The first thing you notice about Esher is the attention to detail and the very high quality of every structure and line between the stunts. Many hours have gone into creating exciting trails that effortlessly link and flow.
Most of the trails end up at the bottom of the park and flow onto an awesome wallride which can be rolled or launched out of. There are four or five different entries to this, a standard 6/7foot drop, see-saw drop, small launch or big launch which sends you a good 20ft down into the bottom. Hitting this is pretty much as fun as it gets, loads of air time, a perfect landing and best of all for you media whores plenty of angles for sick photos. Watching your mates send it off here is great and we spent most of our day hitting it again and again. Later on Rob told us about new plans for the bottom, he intends to put in a 5ft vertical extension on top of the current wall ride to make a Whistler boneyard style stunt.
As the pics show the park is absolutely crammed with stunts and lines which keep riders occupied for hours, we spent a good 6 hours there. All of us agreed this was the best days riding we'd had in a while and everyone improved massively during the day. If your thinking it's a long way it's definitely well worth the trip. We drove for 2 and a half hours and loved it so much we're going back down next Friday. The costs are £10 to join for a year and this includes your first ride session and subsequent sessions are only a fiver. Esher also does a season pass for £65. Esher are run not-for-profit and your money will go into helping parks like this to continue to operate. With stupidly high insurance costs stopping most parks operating (read Churchill) they need all the help they can get. Skip a day of a 3min descent for a 30min walk and get down to Esher!
Dud
www.eshershore.com
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