Mountain Bike Holiday with Basque MTB

In two weeks BasqueMTB will receive our first customers of the year. It seems like winter has flown past, especially with the near perfect mountain biking weather we have had. The mountains are dry, the mud from the short snow melt has long since gone and all the trails are riding very nicely.  Roll on the 2012 mountain bike holiday season!

Over the last month we have shot another couple of mountain bike videos. The idea with the videos is to give people an idea of what to expect on their mountain bike holiday. The Basque Country is so different to other parts of Spain. Unique and beautiful. The variety is what really sets us apart from the rest of Spain though. We can ride on the beach one day, in the mountains the next and deep in the old forests the following. There are not many places in the world, certainly not in Spain where that is possible. Hopefully these last two videos give an idea of the majestic beauty of the Basque Country, along with some of the variety we have.

“Epic Days, Blue Skies and Snowy Ridgelines”
This is a very different type of mountain bike trail. The day starts with a big, tough climb up to over 1000m where the summit is rewarded by the most amazing views. The trail then follows a ridgeline, up and down, before a final 10km descent back to the start. This video was shot just after the snow which covered the Basque Country, and the Pyrenees and the trail was still covered with snow in many places. It made the climbs hard but the descents were still great fun.

“Rocky Hell Road”
This is a strange title for our video! We name all of our trails, it is the only way to keep track of were we ride due to the number of different mountain bike trails in the area. This trail was named by the local rider in this video and the name has just stuck. The trail is very technical, almost like trials riding in places. Only the most skilled mountain bikers are really going to enjoy this descent.

This video was shot at the end of 2011, just after the end of our mountain biking holiday season. The Spanish weather was perfect for mountain biking, dry and sunny but not too warm. I spend a couple of days mountain biking and filming and then edited it together into this video. Ideally a video should be between two and three minutes long but the scenery on the coast was so stunning I just couldn’t bring myself to cut the video any further!

At BasqueMTB we started producing videos to show people what the mountain biking was like in this part of Spain. Many people know of the south of Spain for mountain bike holidays, however the infinitely more beautiful Basque country is relatively unknown. Many people don’t even know where the Basque country is, or have heard of San Sebastian but don’t know its location. We think that if people can see how beautiful this area is they will want to come here and that is the reason we started producing these mountain bike videos and pictures. So far that seems to be true and the series of videos we have produced have had hundreds of thousands of views from hundreds of different countries all over the world. It reinforces our view that the Basque country is one of the best places in the world for a holiday. Or for anything else for that matter!

Alistair Roberts was visiting the Basque Country with his FPV plane, an Easystar which he has funded and built as part of his final year project at school. An amazing feat. He flies it with video goggles linked to a GoPro camera on the plane which is servo driven to mimic his head movements. We took the plane and my bike, (a Cove G-Spot) up a local mountain to capture some footage of me riding in the stunning scenery offered by the Basque mountains.

While we were filming the wind picked up, making it very hard to control the plane and we had to abandon the shoot without all the footage we wanted. Hopefully next year we will capture some more footage!

You can read more details on the shoot over on the BasqueMTB website: http://www.basquemtb.com/video-cove-gspot-mountain-bike-versus-easystar-fpv-plane/