A rider's shortlist. Every entry is real, named accurately, and on every serious bucket list — cross-referenced against Pinkbike, IMBA, Red Bull, BikeRadar/MBR, and the UCI calendar.
There are tens of thousands of mountain bike trails on Earth. Maybe a few hundred get talked about everywhere. About ten of those keep coming up in every top-list, every World Cup highlight reel, every "where I want to ride before I die" thread on Pinkbike. This is that list.
I'm 13 and I ride hardtail around Tipperary. Most of these I haven't ridden yet — but I've watched enough laps, race runs and helmet-cam edits to know which tracks the pros and the pilgrims keep coming back to. So this is the world's best, curated honestly. No filler.
The list
10 iconic tracks.
01 · Park / Flow
A-Line
🇨🇦 Whistler Mountain Bike Park, British Columbia, Canada
The most copied trail in mountain biking, and the one nobody has quite matched. A-Line was built around 2003 by Tom Prochazka and Dave Kelly (later the founders of Gravity Logic) and basically invented the modern flow trail. Jump after jump after machine-cut berm, with the famous Moonbooter — a 12 m / 40 ft tabletop — about two-thirds of the way down. After A-Line existed, flow trails started showing up at every bike park on the planet.
Pretty much every Whistler edit you've ever seen has A-Line footage in it. Brandon Semenuk grew up on it. So did half the slopestyle field.
Difficulty
Black (advanced)
Why it matters
The trail every other flow line tried to be.
02 · Backcountry / Enduro
The Whole Enchilada
🇺🇸 Moab, Utah, USA
Six trails stitched into one all-day mission: Burro Pass → Hazard County → Kokopelli → UPS → LPS → Porcupine Rim, starting at 11,200 ft in the snowy La Sal Mountains and finishing 26.5 miles later at the Colorado River. That's nearly 8,000 ft of descending in a single ride — alpine singletrack at the top, slickrock-and-cliff-edge desert at the bottom.
Plan on four hours if you're fit and confident. Plan on seven if you stop for the views, which you will. The shuttle window is short — usually late June through early October once the snow clears Burro Pass.
Difficulty
Advanced — steep tech, exposure, drops
Why it matters
The single greatest day-ride in North America.
03 · Freeride
Red Bull Rampage venue
🇺🇸 Virgin, Utah, USA
Held on raw desert cliffs near Zion National Park since 2001. There is no set track — riders and their dig crews build their own lines down the face of the mountain in the week before the contest, choosing between cliff drops, canyon gaps, ridge-walks and step-downs that look genuinely unsurvivable. The exposure is the whole point.
Past winners include Andreu Lacondeguy, Brandon Semenuk (a four-time champion who's redefined what's possible there), Cam Zink, and Kyle Strait — Strait won the very first Rampage as a teenager. The 2026 edition runs .
Difficulty
Invite-only. Don't.
Why it matters
The wildest piece of dirt in the sport.
04 · DH / Freeride
Red Bull Hardline track
🏴 Dyfi Valley, near Machynlleth, Wales
Dan Atherton's brutal hand-built course in the same valley as Dyfi Bike Park. Hardline is widely called the hardest DH race in the world — it combines World-Cup speed with massive freeride features (the Road Gap, the Cannondale Step-Down, the Y Gap) and a finish-line jump big enough that only a handful of riders on the planet will hit it. Closed to the public 364 days a year.
Gee Atherton, Bernard Kerr, Ronan Dunne and Jess Blewitt are names you'll see in the highlights reel. In 2024 the format expanded to a Southern-Hemisphere round at Maydena, Tasmania.
Difficulty
Invite-only race
Why it matters
The hardest DH race on Earth.
05 · Mass-start Enduro / DH
Megavalanche course
🇫🇷 Alpe d'Huez, French Alps
Le Mégavalanche has run at Alpe d'Huez since the 1990s. It starts on the Pic Blanc glacier at 3,330 m, with hundreds of riders dropping in together in a mass-start across snow, then transitioning to scree, then alpine singletrack, then forest, all the way down to Allemond at the bottom of the valley. The full descent is roughly 30 km and 2,600 m of vertical.
The combination of altitude, mass-start chaos, varied terrain and sheer length makes it like nothing else in the calendar. The 2026 edition runs .
Difficulty
Open entry — but humbling
Why it matters
A glacier mass-start. Nothing else like it.
06 · DH
Champéry World Cup track
🇨🇭 Champéry, Portes du Soleil, Switzerland
The track every DH racer fears. The course starts at 1,647 m and drops 582 m in just 1.72 km — that's a 33% average gradient, with steepest pitches hitting around 60%. It's a relentless gauntlet of roots, slick rocks and blind corners. First raced in 2006, it's where Danny Hart's untouchable 2011 World Championship run happened (in the rain, of all things) — still one of the most replayed DH runs ever filmed.
Revamped in 2024 ahead of the European Champs and the 2025 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships. If a track gets called the steepest in the world, this is the one.
Difficulty
World Cup elite
Why it matters
Steepest, gnarliest race track ever cut.
07 · DH / XCO
Mont-Sainte-Anne
🇨🇦 Beaupré, Québec, Canada
The longest-running venue on the entire UCI MTB World Cup calendar — racing since 1991, with 30+ years of memories. Massive exposed granite bedrock from top to bottom, root sections that turn into rivers when it rains, finish-line speeds clocked above 60 km/h. It's hosted three World Championships and basically every Elite name in the sport has raced here.
It's not on the 2026 World Cup calendar (a first since 2016 outside pandemic years) but Crankworx is making the venue its 2026 Grand Final from 3–7 September, which is its own kind of homecoming.
Difficulty
Bike park grades + World Cup DH
Why it matters
30 years of World Cup history in one place.
08 · Trail / XC
Glentress
🏴 Tweed Valley, Scottish Borders, Scotland
The flagship 7stanes trail centre — 73 km of waymarked trails an hour out of Edinburgh, with everything from a flowy green for the kids up to genuinely committing black sections like Spooky Wood. Glentress was the centre that put UK trail riding on the map in the 2000s and it's still the busiest in Britain, with a skills park, a freeride area and a café at the base.
The 2025 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships were hosted across the Tweed Valley (including neighbouring Innerleithen), giving Glentress and its sister centres a fresh global spotlight.
Difficulty
Green → black, full range
Why it matters
The trail centre that built UK mountain biking.
09 · Park / DH
Queenstown Bike Park (Skyline)
🇳🇿 Queenstown, South Island, New Zealand
New Zealand's first gondola-served bike park, hanging off Bob's Peak almost 500 m above central Queenstown. 32 trails across 30+ km of singletrack, looking straight down on Lake Wakatipu and across to the Remarkables. Hammy's Track at the bottom is a 6 km flowy blue that kids can session for hours; up top, Slippery Ninja and Original are full-on double-black rock-fest lines.
Queenstown also hosts Crankworx Rotorua's New Zealand sister scene and was the launchpad for a generation of Kiwi pros — the Brosnans, Sam Blenkinsop, Kade Edwards. It's the bike park to plan a southern-hemisphere winter trip around.
Difficulty
Green → double-black
Why it matters
World's first gondola-served park, on a lake.
10 · DH / XCO / Park
Leogang
🇦🇹 Saalfelden-Leogang, Salzburgerland, Austria
Austria's World Cup home. Leogang has been on the UCI Downhill calendar since 2010 and now hosts every gravity discipline — XCO, XCC, DHI and EDR all under one weekend in 2026 (11–14 June). The DH course is fast, jumpy and finishes with the trademark hip-jump-into-the-finish-arena that you've seen in every World Cup highlight reel from the last decade.
Under the race tracks is a properly stacked bike park with green-graded flow lines, a freeride zone (the Hangman 2 line is famous in its own right) and the Riders Playground for first-timers. It's the single best place in Europe to combine spectating a World Cup with actually riding it.
Difficulty
Green → World Cup DH
Why it matters
Austria's World Cup home — every discipline in one weekend.
Honourable mentions that didn't make the cut but came really close: Finale Ligure (Italy — birthplace of the EWS), Schladming's Planai DH (Austria), Pal Arinsal (Andorra — 2026 has it back on World Cup), Bromont (Québec), Aiguebelette / Châtel, Squamish (BC backcountry), and Derby Tasmania's Blue Tier. Any of those could swap in.