Trails Merge: Every Lap Is a Different Ride

Behind the making of Sun Peaks’ new Bike Park Film

From the village, the mountain looks almost still. The chairs move quietly overhead, the trees barely shifting against the sky.

Up on the trails, though, everything is moving.

A rider drops into a blue flow trail and finds their rhythm corner by corner. Another lines up a jump trail, already looking three features ahead. Deeper in the trees, tires cut into steeper dirt, brakes feather for a split second, and a technical line opens up fast.

That's the idea behind the new Sun Peaks Bike Park film, Trails Merge. Not one kind of riding or one kind of rider, and definitely not one perfect top-to-bottom lap. It's all of it happening all at once.

The same dirt, completely different rides

The film’s concept came from a chairlift conversation. While riding with friends, Matt Brooks of Lone Wolf Productions started talking about something that happens constantly at Sun Peaks. Riders rarely take one single trail from top to bottom, and a lap becomes a mix of a flow section here, a jump line there, a steeper track further down and a pause where someone is headed a different way that changes your ride too.

It became the backbone of the film: Trails Merge.

"A big part of experiencing the Sun Peaks Bike Park is understanding the vast variety of options you have in every single run down the mountain, because so many of the trails meet one another," Brooks says. "You'll often come across another group at a fork who are headed in a different direction, and then your ride totally changes, usually for the better."

It says a lot about the park. Everyone off the lift gets the same trails and the same dirt. What changes is how you move through it. A newer rider might roll into a blue flow trail looking for confidence and control, while a seasoned rider treats that same stretch as a warm-up before linking into something faster, and the expert rider barely registers it on the way to a rougher, more technical line further down. It's the same trail every time. The ride is never quite the same twice.

One lap, built a hundred different ways

Some runs are about getting loose, finding the rhythm of the berms until your body stops thinking and just goes, and you reach the bottom already wanting one more. Other days call for commitment, staying off the brakes a beat longer than might feel natural, trusting the tires to hold. Then there's progression. The feature that gave you trouble in June looks different in August, once you've built the feel for it. And sometimes a run is just for the joy of it, riding something you've done fifty times that still has more to give.

Trails Merge captures that range across these trails: Insanity One, Canada Line, Super Nugget, Bad Habit, Sugar, DH and Might As Well.

It's less a single-lane view of the Bike Park than a moving snapshot of how much fits into one day of riding here.

That variety shows up in the riders too. There's the regular who knows every corner by feel and still finds something new, the progression hunter who's spent all season on one feature and finally threads it clean on a quiet afternoon, and the parent keeping pace with their kid at the start of the day and just barely not by the last run. Then there's the solo rider who loaded the chair alone and unloaded into a conversation with a stranger who ended up as a trail partner for the rest of the day.

The film follows that mix through downhill riders Brock Hawes and Johnathan Helly, jump-line specialists Soren Farenholtz and Marcus Cant, and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from Sam Loxton. Together, they treat the Bike Park as a living network, where one rider's line crosses another's plan, and the lap changes because of it.

How the film got made

The team wanted to capture more than the biggest features or the fastest riders on the mountain. They were after the pauses where riders regroup, the split-second choice to follow one trail instead of another.

To get those shots, the production moved with the riders. For two days, Brooks worked alongside cinematographer Liam Irvine, dual operating a range of camera rigs, with one person running a gimbal by hand or mounted to their back while the other controlled camera functions remotely. Cranes and cable cams required careful planning, since many shots had to be captured before the Bike Park opened to the public, with equipment set up the evening before and operated early the next morning so the crew could work efficiently while keeping the trails clear for riders.

It's the kind of detail most viewers never notice, which is sort of the point. When the shots land, all you see is the rider, not the rig chasing them.