Jonesy, Jon the Designer and Rowan Sorrell (I think, see note) are out near Malaga at the moment testing bikes for the magazine at a place called SwitchBacks DH. It seems the perfect place to go for a spot of winter riding and sun. But if you do go make sure you remember your passport. We just got a text from Jonesy saying Rowan had forgotten his, so maybe the Sorrell will be spending this weekend in the Welsh mud instead.

Anyway,stay tuned for the feature in the magazine.

Oh and I gave Jon a small pink camera to snap for the website. Hopefully we’ll turn the blurred, out of focus shots into some sort of time lapse/slide show combo on his return.

So here’s some more info from Michael at Switchbacks (the photos we’re actually taken by Jonesy on a previous visit)

Winter Downhilling in Spain

For years UK downhillers have been forced to ride their DH rigs only a few weeks out of the year – one week in France and the other week composed of muddy uplifts on the back of a lorry in the freezing cold and wet closer to home.
But no more.
At last you can ride your big rig throughout the winter without risk of hypothermia and wearing your brake pads out every run due to mud and grit.

Switch-backsDH.com has set up a winter DH camp in southern Spain, based just 15 minutes away from Malaga airport. This means you can fly from just about anywhere in the UK in little over 2 hours and find yourself surrounded by sun and empty, dry, flowing DH tracks by the dozen.

The trails can be described as ‘the ideal off-season training ground: doubles, gaps, drops, step-ups, berms etc, you will get it all out here, but many of the trails are wheels on the ground stuff so if you want to get your bike race-fettled with low risk of accident then it is an excellent location’.

With about 20 DH tracks varying between 3 and 30 minutes in length, riders can session one track all day like race prep or you can ride a wide variety of different tracks each day – Switchbacks guides will customise the runs to you.

Another bonus is the proximaty of the trails to each other which keeps shuttling to a minimum.
With flights in Feb and March from the UK to Spain costing as little as £80 return including bringing your bike, there is now very little reason not to enjoy winter DHing in the sun.

Photos: Steve Jones

Check out Switch-backsDH.com for more details.

Dirt editor steve jones and rowan sorrell downhill mountain biking in spain with switch back DH