Riding EVERY LINE At America’s Largest Asphalt Bike Park

Swannanoa’s Beacon Mountain Bike Park isn’t open yet, but I got a sneak peek and rode all of the lines!

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This is Beacon Park in Swanoa, North Carolina. And it can only be described as a linear skate park for mountain bikes, endless asphalt jump lines, wall rides, whale tales, and wooden BMS. And chances are good that you have the skills to have some serious fun here. That’s because the lines start out with flowy beginner trails that you could literally ride on a beach cruiser. and they ramp up from there until you’re basically on a stage from Sonic the Hedgehog. And this project couldn’t come at a better time for this community, which is in much need of some optimism and momentum right now. So, let’s ride everything here, starting with that beginner line, and I’ll tell you more about it. All right, this is the beginner line. Now, it all trends slightly downhill, and you can also pump these and get a lot more speed. Oh, I’m going too fast. Shooting over these. Feel like a few more laps on that and I could double a lot more of that stuff. That is a seriously fun beginner line. [Music] That’s truly something anyone can ride on any bike. I was jumping from hump to hump, but you could just roll over those. If you can pedal and squeeze a brake, this is right in your wheelhouse. If you look at those humps, one side has a crease and the other rolls over. That allows you to advance your jumping skills safely. Even those BMS are optional. You don’t need to roast them. You can just ride around them. And in a moment, you’ll see how the intermediate line has even more options to progress your skills. Beacon is for skill progression, or it will be when it’s finished. [Music] The paving was only completed last week. The grass, the playground, the amphitheater, climbing walls, and all the other amenities will soon be here. But these trails, or lines, as I’ve been calling them, will be open before summer. And yes, at this moment, Beacon is the largest paved bike park in the United States by linear feet. A title that seems to change every week as more and more of these are built. And this is in Swan Noah, North Carolina. The town that made national headlines last year after Hurricane Helen tore through it. After all this town has endured, I’m so very happy to see such momentum, not just here at Beacon, but all over this resilient community. This facility will not just have a bike park. It’s going to be a place to socialize, to walk, to hang out with your family, and just be a human being for free. Okay, intermediate lines right off the top here. Yes. And now we’re into some jumps. At a paved park, I always forget how fast you end up going with so little effort, and they end up going too fast. So, I’ve got to dial it back a little bit to catch this stuff the right way. Okay. Yeah. Oh man. Wow. That is some intermediate line. I know that looks like a lot, but let’s break it down. Right. The beginner line was more or less rollers and BMS and then all of a sudden we’re stepping up to big wall rides like this one and what seemed like mandatory jumps. Let me take you back up there and show you how you can ride this line if you’re a beginner. So, we’ll roll in with a lot less speed. These lips over here look really intimidating, but actually you can just roll right onto them very easily. Just stand up. You can’t do this sitting down. Just stand up and it’ll work. And actually, you don’t even have to ride this burm. You can just say we’re up here. Now, even the wall ride you can progress on. See, we’re coming up to it here. I took off right over here. You can actually come here and just play around with it. Just kiss it with your front wheel and feel it out and get higher and higher. And that’s it. That wasn’t so scary. So, in other words, this trail is designed for you to progress not only from the beginner line to the intermediate line, but from the intermediate line to the advanced line. So, once you’ve rolled through it like I did, and then done all the features, including the wall ride, you can actually step up again from there before you go to the advanced line. Let me show you. So, you can see here we have a little jump. You can see it starts to curve down over here and then mellow out and then it curves down again over here. That’s so you have three options. Okay, the first option you can just roll over the entire thing, no problem. Second option, you can catch a little bit of air and because it goes down over here, there’s actually a little bit of a transition and then you can roll down the next hump. Now, if you have a lot of speed, you can actually jump over this whole first hump and land down over here. So, if you’re kind of working up your jumping skills on a trail like this, you have several options on the same jump that you’re used to rolling up to. Now, you can do the same thing over there on that wooden burm I’m going to show you. So, here you can see there’s a wooden burm as I showed you. You can ride the bottom of it or you can go as high as you want. But really, the progression is in your exit strategy. You can just roll down the burm onto the pavement or you can jump out of the top of it and pump down this asphalt transition over here. Feels really cool. It helps you generate speed, helps you build some skills, and you don’t need to do it. But even if you’re moderately experienced, a lot of this stuff was probably obvious to you just by looking at it. You know what’s not obvious? Trailbuilders are kind of cheeky and they’ll set things up that only the really good riders notice. Let me show you this one over here. So, here are the final three BMS of the intermediate line. And then you can see right over here is the beginner line. You think they put them right here by accident? It was just a major coincidence. No, I don’t think so. They know that some people are going to jump from that burm on the intermediate line to that burm on the beginner line. And since it’s the end of the line, you’re not giving up the wall ride and you can see down the trail to see if anybody’s coming. I’ve never done this before. Let me give it a little uh try. [Music] Like any other well-built jump park, there’s a ton of little Easter eggs hidden around here. I’m not going to spoil them all for you, but once you’ve worked out a few of these, you’re probably ready to step it up to the advanced line. You might have heard this term before. This is a squirrel catcher. It’s the first feature on the advanced line and it’s here so that if you come up to it and you say I don’t really want to ride that. You probably shouldn’t. That way you don’t drop into the line and get into a situation that you kind of shouldn’t be in. Nice steep landing after the squirrel catcher. And then normal set of jumps. And you can see the lips are caned so you can get nice and steey whip over them. And then things start to get spicy. You can see there’s a lip over here and you’re jumping into the first of two whale tails. This one is slanted, right? You’re hipping into the whale tail and out. There’s a nice little gap here. And if you don’t catch this just right, it’s kind of hard to make the next jump. And assuming you catch this just right and you clear this gap into this landing, you’re going to have enough speed to get up onto that next feature, the onoff. Some people would call that a lily pad. So, you’re going to gap up onto here, ride across. If you’re really good, you could manual or something, and then huck into that landing. There’s more features ahead. So, you’re going to land off the bridge and approach a lip that you can see is way caned off to the right. Pretty cool. But the landing is caned too in the other direction. So, you’re transferring right but hipping left. It’s a tricky feature. Super fun. After the hip, you have a little setup jump and then the final whale tail. And you can see that little bit of wood peeking up there. That’s intimidating because it’s kind of blind, but actually this is designed for trail bikes, so it’s kind of mellow and it just works. So, you jump in, you jump out, that’s the end of the run. Really high octane, really stacked with features from beginning to end. Let’s go ride it. All right. A little breezy right now to hit some jumps, but let’s do it. I am lucky that I got to figure this out yesterday. So, I’m not just dropping in cold. This is not the kind of line that I would just drop into without figuring it out. Yes. It’s so good. A little windy, but super fun. Let’s go ride that again. [Music] [Music] And yes, obviously there’s a ridiculous pump track as well, that I don’t really have the fitness or skill to ride. But the point is, there’s going to be a lot of stuff here that everybody in the community can use for free. The bike park is going to have some kind of yearly or daily pass, and anybody who can’t afford it, they’re going to be able to ride it for free because that’s what the Beacon Foundation is doing down to bikes. And so, I’m going to definitely be contributing some builds here. The feedback they’ve gotten from the community is that everybody is beyond excited for this place. There are a few people that have raised concerns, though. $4 million in public funds are going to this place when there are some people that still have tarps on their roofs in this area. But the thing is those funds came from the TDA, not from disaster relief. And so it would have gone to some other town in the county for some other project, probably not a bike park. I’d rather see it go to Swaninoa. And the Beacon Foundation has matched all of those funds. When you see this completed park, it’s going to be ridiculous. So along with the restoration efforts in the town, it’s an amazing comeback story for an amazing community. And I’m going to be spending a lot of time here with my family, with my kids, because that’s what a park like this is all about. It’s for everyone. I hope you enjoyed riding Beacon Park with me today. I hope you learned something, and if you didn’t, I hope you at least found this video entertaining. Thanks for riding with me today, and I’ll see you next time. Okay. Nice. I can’t believe we have this place. Yeah. Hey, that was cool. That was awesome.