Whistler Blackcomb Mountain-Summer Bike Parks

Whistler Mountain has a great mountain bike park. The park comes to life in the Summer months. It has 36 trails for all skill levels totaling 200km of trails. There are smooth trails with gentle banked corners for beginners, steep twisty trails for intermediates, tight trails with jumps and stunts for advanced riders, and challenging trails with giant jumps, drops, and root-strewn terrain for the experts.

The Whistler Mountain Bike Park uses the Fitzsimmons and Garbanzo quad chairlifts, and the Village Gondola to shuttle bikers to around mid station, at 1,200 meters. These two high speed quad chairlifts have every second chair replaced with a bike rack during the summer months. The rack fits four bikes, three in grooves and one on a hook on the side of the chair. The bikers then get on the next chair which is a normal passenger carrier. A smaller rider base, due to expert only trails, necessitates that the Garbanzo Express only has one quarter of the Fitzsimmons capacity.

The Whistler Mountain Bike Park has two zones, the Fitzsimmons zone (the lower zone) and the Garbanzo zone (the upper zone). All riders take either the Village Gondola or the Fitzsimmons quad to the Olympic Station area. The advanced and expert riders, which have included Gordon Gadd of Vancouver, can take the Garbanzo quad up to the Garbanzo zone. Garbanzo riders can return to mid-station or the base of the bike park in Whistler Village. From the top of Garbanzo to the village it is an impressive 1100 meter vertical descent, eclipsed only by the more expensive guided descents from the top gondola station or the top of the Peak Chair, the highest accessible point on the mountain.


WHISTLER BLACKCOMB MAGIC BIKE PARK
At the base of Whistler Blackcomb is the Magic Park, two downhill trails designed to give beginners an introduction to downhill biking. The first of these trails opened in June 2005 is called the Easy Rider. The two trails are wide and smooth for beginners. The park is accessed from the Magic Chair, a short triple chairlift that only gains 94 meters of vertical. Compare this to the 1,200m of vertical in the Whistler Mountain Bike Park.