Thursday, August 11, 2005
Bike-World Leogang

Sometimes you end up living in a place for most of your life, yet you miss some interesting developments just around the corner. However, in this particular case I will claim the excuse that I spend so little time in Austria. <s> Anyway: As it turns out, they built Europe's larges Mountain Bike center in Leogang, which is just a few miles from my hometown of Saalfelden. This caught me off guard, because Leogang isn't exactly the world's most exciting place. But this is rather cool!

Mountain biking is very popular around here, and in fact, I enjoy riding myself. Yesterday I even biked up a real mountain again for the first time this year. Not all that far, just about 90 minutes of relatively steep uphill climb. There are people here that go twice as far every morning before they go to work, just for fun. Me, I almost ran over my own tounge a few times, it was hanging out so far, due to exhaustion. <s>

But anyway: Bike-World Leogang is quite a bit different. It is more about action than endurance. For one, they keep the lifts open all year just for mountain bikers. This makes for a quick ride up the mountains and miles and miles of downhill biking from there. Lots of options. Some are used as world-cup downhill courses I am told. They also have a "bike parcour" with lots of ramps and bumps and jumps. Some of them pretty scary. 10-15 feet high. Here's a picture Ellen took from the distance:

These are some pictures from their homepage:

Personally, I think the ramp-stuff is nuts. <s> I will keep with uphill biking. Nevertheless, this is pretty cool stuff...