Cranmore Bike Park

Photo: Union Leader

Overview:

Cranmore Bike Park is located in North Conway and just opened very recently, offering lift service downhill trails within a place that’s already an MTB mecca! Currently, the park has 4 trails including 2 greens, 1 blue, and a black trail. Cranmore has marketed itself as a great beginner friendly option compared to neighboring parks like Attiash and Bretton Woods.

Pros:

Cranmore has succeeded in their goal to make beginner friendly trails! Basically everything on the mountain can be ridden by anyone, even if it’s you’re first time mountain biking. They’ve also added some really fun berms and a few doubles on the black trail called The Stembogen. Since the park is new, there are little to no braking bumps and when I visited, the trail crew was maintaining the trails for the entire day! If you get sick of riding park, you can also connect Cranmore to Hurricane Mountain via the ridge trail.

Cons:

If you want to experience the sensation of downhill mtb for the first time at Cranmore, you’ll have to brave the extremely slow chairlift that takes forever to reach the top. I thought the lift at Powder Ridge was slow, but the chair here is on a new level. Also, there isn’t really much here if you’re not a beginner aside from only 3 side hits which get boring after awhile. Also, there are barely any trails here since the park is in phase one, and all the trails are flow with no technical riding to speak of.

Rating (Bike Park Scale): N/A

Since Cranmore opened literally two weeks ago, I think it’s unfair to give it a harsh rating. All parks started out with only 4 trails at one point or another, before they became popular like they are today. However I can’t ignore the fact that the neighboring trails on Hurricane Mountain and the West Side have way more features than the bike park despite being built by volunteers instead of a professional trail crew. I guess we’ll just have to see what’s next for Cranmore before we can judge it.