“The right line is death,” Will Warren calmly tells us. “The left line is just… horrible,” he adds. “Take your pick.” Not the words you’d usually expect from a guide halfway up a mountain, but he’s not wrong. As the riders in front of me creep into a chute ahead, I’m not exactly filled with confidence, and there’s an alarming amount of squeal echoing towards me, from both brakes and riders.
Up until now the trail’s been on the nervous side of technical, boulders the size of softballs roll and boil under our wheels, greased with a liberal dash of mud. The gradient’s been steep but not ridiculous, and it’s given us 500m of trail to settle in
