“TOPOGRAPHICALLY blessed.”
It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but that’s exactly how Tony Boone, a longtime mountain bike trail builder, described the rolling slopes of San Mateo, Rizal. Located just east of the greater Metro Manila area, it had become a haven for trail riders and mountain bike racers. By the mid-2010s, when Boone visited, weekend races had even become a fixture there.
“The elevation is nice, there’s rolling terrain, there’s nothing too steep,” recalled Agu Paiso, who'd hit the San Mateo trails with fellow rider Edmund Mangaser even before the Timberland Highlands Resort had been built. “It was just raw land. You enter, you end up somewhere. You get lost, probably.”
But after taking Boone to Timerbland, and hearing their old stomping grounds described as “topographically blessed”, an idea started taking root in the mind of Mangaser.
And while it took many years (and a global pandemic) to make it happen, the dream is now finally carved in the San Mateo dirt: the Timberland Mountain Bike Park, an international-caliber network of trails inside the main resort.
What are the trails inside the Timberland Mountain Bike Park?
When the park opens to the public on the first day of the 2024 Lunar New Year, it will have a total of 12 trails. The shortest runs at just 300 meters, while the longest is “Enter the Dragon”, a grueling 1.9-kilometer trek that cuts across the entire length of the park. Built for intermediate riders, it offers the complete trail experience, including landmarks of bridges and drops and photo points named for parts of the draconic anatomy — the Dragon’s Breath, the Dragon’s Belly, the Dragon’s Tail. (Auspicious names, indeed, for the Year of the Dragon.)
“Enter the Dragon” terminates at the southernmost point of the park, and to head back to the entrance, you’ll need to climb “M*A*S*H*” and “Bill & Ted” — relatively easier trails that, still, offer bracing ascents.
Sharp-eyed readers may have already noticed that the trails are named after movies. “If it’s a comedy, there’s climbing involved,” laughed Paiso, who is the marketing head behind the trail park. “If it’s an action movie, there’s going to be fun.”
There are trails like “Point Break” — “It’s like you’re surfing on dirt,” described Paiso — or “The Matrix”— “Very technical, but just like in The Matrix, you have a choice: You can take a technical line, you can take a faster line.”
But for beginners and first-time riders, entering the park through the main access point along the resort’s Spine Road, there is “Fifty First Dates”, a friendly trail that nevertheless offers a complete package of all the park’s features: bridges, skinnies, rollers, berms, tabletops, and other man-made modifications to spice up your ride.
“When you master these features, that’s when you can enter the trails,” says Paiso.
How to ride inside the Timberland Mountain Bike Park
For Paiso and the other partners, designing each trail in Timberland was a painstaking process of staking out the path, poring over Google Earth and other topographical maps, and doing countless walkarounds and rides. The most important thing they were looking for with each trail was “flow.”
“Basically, you want a rider to brake less,” explains Paiso. “So you build trials with smooth turns with a gradual radius. You’re carving the turn like a surfer, instead of hitting the brakes and steering.” Features — especially berms, which are gently sloping embankments that crown a turn, or rollers, which are a series of humps — are important in dictating the flow of every trail, speeding up or slowing down each rider along.
It’s these features that Paiso hopes give Timberland Mountain Bike Park an international-level caliber. He’s excited for riders — new and experienced alike — to take the trail features through their paces.
Equally important to the team behind the park are the safeguards they’ve built into the park to ensure the safety of every rider. For starters, everyone who enters the park to ride is insured. They also have emergency medical services on standby, as well as a series of air horns scattered around the trails so responders can signal for help, even if a rider is out of coverage area for mobile phones or radios.
With that solid foundation of safety and security guaranteeing every ride, Paiso is confident that mountain bikers can push their limits inside the Timberland trails.
“There are people who ride for fun. There are people who train to race .So their definition of fun is different,” says Paiso. “Fun might be a podium place in a race. Fun might be clearing Bill and Ted non-stop for the first time. Or beating friends to the top of the climb. Or even clearing a tabletop, or going down our trails for the first time.” But for all those different kinds of riders, Timberland Mountain Bike Park hopes to offer a dirty, sweaty, good time.
Timberland Mountain Bike Park is inside Timberland Highlands Resort, San Mateo, Rizal. Entrance is P550. For convenient booking and more park information, you can download the app on Google Play or the Apple Store.
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