River Valley Bike Park

For the longest time, gravity riding in Bukidnon for us meant heading to Mangima and spending the entire day there. But when we made our way back, we heard about a newly opened, rowdy little bike park about half the time away from the city of Cagayan de Oro: The River Valley Bike Park or simply RVR.

The River Valley Ranch now houses it’s very own, and very steezy, bike park. At the time of this writing (December 2021), we got to try 3 tracks inside the park — two blue lines and one black diamond, aptly named after BikeLab’s own: Renax Trail.

SYSTEM OF A STOKE

The park is great not only because of its features, we’ll get to that. But how the park works is top-notch as well. They’ve got a well-oiled system that works great: from the lift cards to world-standard system signage that lets you know what kind of riding to look forward to.

WHAT TO EXPECT

Well, as we said above: there’s levels to this. And with ANY ride, any park, any trail, we say STICK TO YOUR LIMITS. Progress is best done slow and steady, at a pace you’re comfortable with and devoid of peer pressure.

Now that that’s out of the way, the park RIPS. It’s short (about 3-5 mins from top to bottom on a Blue track) and really responsive. What we mean by that is that for some weird, cosmic reason, the tracks react you your skill level. It gives back what you give it — if you ride it right and at a controlled pace, you’ll enjoy it. If you cruise down slowly and session each part, you’ll enjoy it. And if you send it hard and fast and throw down with everything, you’ll REALLY enjoy it.

That gnarly, little road gap up top is in the black diamond track called Cobra Bite, and if we think and remember really hard — it was a double black diamond track. That, so far, was the hardest feature to hit.

THEY KEEP BUILDING

Also as of this writing, the park messaged us that “the DH line is now open!” and we just had to giggle quietly in excitement. I mean, we just came from there a week ago and there were more than enough tracks to get our stoke on. The two Blue trails we did were mint — we started off with two hits down Lily Beth, which as Blue trails go, pushes the pace. Right away there’s a drop, some nice small jumps, and a bevy of features that makes it exciting enough to get our heart rates up.

Then we did Renax Trail, named after the Godfather of Send Renax Lim of BikeLab. That was a bit of a technical blur because honestly, we got lost. It was our first time there and we just enjoyed every bit of the scenery, but as soon as we found our way back, we then realized why it has a Black Diamond rating.

A REAL PLAYGROUND

The other Blue trail we did was Monkey Trail and we gotta say, we had so much fun on that one. You’re hit with two switchbacks as soon as you go and then a nice, squashy jump a bit after that. The track then opens up and it gets fast — just watch out for the tricky rocky part in the middle, there’s an option but we recommend just sending it off the rock. As we said, it gets fast from there and off-camber, plus some jumps and drops. We hit Monkey Trail a grand total of 4 runs. It was beautiful.

Once you get down, there’s a small practice track with a teeter-totter (think see-saw but for bikes) and Gorio the Gallant (not his actual title) is there and ready to take you and your bike all the way back up — that’s what the lift card is for. When you run out of lift cards, and you will, each succeeding lift is 30PHP, that’s like less than a dollar.

All said, RVR Bike Park is quite possibly one of the BEST bike parks in the country. It has almost everything for everyone and the river it gets its name from is just as breathtaking as the ride.

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