Rattlesnake Bike Park
About
Rattlesnake Bike Park is the closest shuttle-assisted to Charlotte. It's approximately 1-hour outside of Southwest Charlotte in Winnsboro, SC straight down I-77. This park offers a great introduction to bike park riding with plenty of great riding for beginners, fast jump (and other features) lines for seasoned riders, and even some double black features for the expert riders. Very nice facilities, staff, and trails. Highly recommend!
The trails are all accessed at the top of the "mountain" where the shuttle drops you at their facility with food, drinks, tables, and bathrooms. From the the summit, pick your path down the upper mountain, hit a "Mid Mountain Connection" clearing to catch your breath, and then a second trail to reach the bottom at the shuttle pick up.
Beginner
These trails are perfect for beginners or getting warmed up to bike park speeds.
Southern Comfort
A silky smooth, flowy machine-built run down the upper half of the mountain. It brings you right into the mid-mountain junction where you can decide how spicy you want the rest of your lap to be.
Mid Mountain Connection
Not so much a trail as a short, easy connector zone in the middle of the hillside. It’s the perfect spot to regroup with friends and plot your next move.
Home Run
Fast and flowy run from the mid-mountain junction straight to the bottom area. Careful here because a lot of the higher speed, more advanced trails converge into the trail to bring riders back to the shuttle pickup.
Intermediate
These trails dial things up a notch with faster speeds, larger berms, and optional features to help you progress.
50 Shades of Clay
One of the most popular tracks in the park. It’s a long, sweeping upper-mountain trail that takes full advantage of the local dirt to deliver massive, grippy berms and pure flow down to the mid-mountain split.
Sabotage
Dropping straight out of the shuttle zone at the summit, this is a super fun, active line that keeps you on your toes before merging into the lower trail network.
Dirt Surfer
Starting from mid-mountain, this trail lets you "surf" your way down to the base on sculpted rollers and playful intermediate features.
Voodoo
A quick, punchy option from the mid-mountain clearing that gives you a fast dose of intermediate fun before feeding into Paradise for the final stretch.
Chupacabra
A wicked fast lower-mountain line that trades slower technical riding for raw momentum, eventually blending right into Paradise.
Paradise
A highly-rated lower run that acts as a main artery for the bottom half of the hill, combining friendly flow with plenty of speed.
Expert
Where things get serious. Expect mandatory gaps, drops, steep pitches, and the few rugged technical features the park hides up its sleeve like giant drops, wall rides, huge step ups and downs with mandatory gaps, and huuuuge knuckle jumps.
Purgatory
This one walks a fine line between a heavy blue and a true black diamond. It's an advanced-intermediate track that throws a bit of everything at you, forcing a fast and furious run to the finish line.
Rock Garden & Medusa
If you actually want to test your bike's suspension on raw terrain instead of smooth jump faces, these are the park's primary tech tracks, featuring rough, chunky rock sections.
Venom
This is the main focal point when you approach the top of the mountain where the massive wall ride and feeder drop grab your attention. The trail is short but is back-to-back Expert-level features. The trail starts off with a 10-12 foot drop into a mandatory gap shark fin and into the jump-gap-wallride-gap sequence, followed by a massive step down and immediately into a gaint step up. There is another smaller wall ride and into a couple more gap jumps and finally ends with a massive stepup.
Waimea
Progressively-larger, motocross-sized knuckle jumps that are pretty much mandatory gaps because if you case...it's not great. The first jump is very doable but nearly every one cases the second one which kills all of your speed for the remainder of the much longer jumps.
Trails
Before You Ride
The below are a selection of our favorite trails. More trails are likely available and can be found on the trail map.
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50 Shades of Clay
Best trail here... Tons of speed, tons of jumps. You have to choke up a bit on your speed right from the first series of jumps if the dirt is rolling well. There's an optional road gap, great kicker jump addition, a couple of step ups, and again, more speed than you can handle. This is a great trail to acclimate to the speed and warm up your jumping legs to get into the bigger stuff.
Mad Hatter
This is great to connect to ~50 Shades of Clay as this feels like an extension of the same flow but with bigger gaps and bigger jumps.
Purgatory
Another great one to connect to 50 Shades of Clay. Features some of the best formed jumps at the park, optional rock gaps that have high visibility to the shuttle passing by (if you're into that sort of thing), and great speed.
Waimea
This is the one you've heard about. HUGE jumps that get progressively bigger as you go down the trail. This starts out on Rock Garden with some nice downhill features (rock garden, jumps, berms) and spits you out into the final run of the beastly jumps. They are no joke so please pre-ride. Pro-tip, pedal your ass off between the first and second jump even if you don't feel like you need to. You do not want to case on this one. Also, no one will fault you for not hitting the last jump. It's a lonnnnnnnng knuckle and absolutely full commit.
Rock Garden
As the name suggests, begins with a rock garden and features great speed and a couple sizeable rock garden gaps.
Voodoo
Another fun little blue downhill line with smaller features and decent speed.
Sabotage
Fun blue with some great speed that'll take you from top to bottom. Some pretty fast drops at the beginning followed by some fast riding through berms and other smaller features.
Venom
Biggest trail here with the most eye-catching feature, the large drop into a HUGE wall ride. The ride is stacked with big features and it's highly visible to the top of the trail system and the shuttles.
Chupacabra
Fun little blue that starts with an optional small jump through a tree. Smaller features that may help you build up confidence to some of the other stuff.
Paradise
Long, flowy green line that is great for warming up the legs or introducing beginners to bike park speed.
Southern Comfort
Home Run
Home Run is a connector green trail that Rock Garden, Waimea, Sabotage, and Venom lead into.
Trail Map
Click the below map to expand the image.
Ratings
Reviews
Fun bike park about an hour from Charlotte, NC. Trail features range from flowy jumps to techy rock garden drops. There are flowy green trails for families and newer riders to have fun on as well. Clean(!) PRIVATE(!!) & INDIVIDUAL(!!!) LOCKING(!!!!) bathrooms with showers!!!!! There is a chill spot to hang out at the main trail head and shop once you get off the shuttle. Highly recommend to everyone and I will be back many many many more times.
Super fun and an easy trip from Charlotte. It's running super fast right now and they must've reshaped/reworked a lot of the jumps and features recently because everything felt super nice.