• Bike-Fax: Snowdonia
• Sue Savege, Paul Barbier and Dafydd Davis
• Book £16.95; CD £9.50
• Bike-Fax
• 00800 4321 3350

The bar has certainly been raised in the MTB guidebook market of late. Titles from the likes the Vertebrate Graphics and Trailrider Guides have brought classy design and smart presentation to what used to be a very drab and dry world. Latest into the fray is Bike-Fax, which styles itself as “The trail information service for mountain bike riders across the UK and Europe”. It’s got a three-pronged approach – the website (www.bike-fax.com), books and CDs. The site is intended to have a big route database on it, allowing you to download individual routes or pick-and-mix to build your own unique guides, but that’s still in the pipeline. What we’re looking at here is the more traditional wing and its silvery-disc equivalent.

We’ll start with the book. It covers Snowdonia (or all of North Wales down as far as Machynlleth) and is the work of local riders Sue Savege, Paul Barbier and Dafydd Davis – yes, that Dafydd Davis, the man responsible for the pioneering Coed y Brenin purpose-built trails. Five of the 25 featured routes are either purpose-built trails ridden as designed or combinations of a bits of a number of them. You may be questioning the worth of route guides of waymarked trails, but if you’ve not been before they’re quite useful – they tell you how to get to the start, for one thing, and give you a good indication what to expect. The other twenty loops are “traditional” bridleway stuff, including loops and classic out-and-backs like the climb and descent of Cadair Idris.

The routes are split into geographical sections, which is fine if you know roughly where you want to go but less useful if you’re looking for a particular kind of ride and don’t mind where you go. All the routes are given a grading system in two parts – an overall grade like “Classic”, “Expert” or “Family” that tells you roughly what kind of ride it is, and a difficulty grade from 1 to 5. But the grades are only shown on the route descriptions themselves – there’s no sign of them in the contents.

Each section has a page of introduction and an area map to locate the routes. The area map is an OS extract, but the actual route maps are illustrations. They’re quite respectable illustrations, and have useful stuff like contour lines on them. If you’re familiar with Welsh Forestry Commission route maps for purpose-built trails, you’ll be at home with the style – bold colours, labelled stretches of trail, smiley faces for the descents, grumpy ones for the climbs and so on. We got a bit bewildered with all the icons that appear on the map – the key at the front of the book is a whole page to cover the forty-odd icons that may appear. They’re mostly quite handy, showing the location of landmarks, particularly nadgery bits, good views and so on, but some routes end up with so many of them that it looks like someone’s spilt a pack of M&Ms on the page. We can’t help thinking that it might be clearer to colour-code the trails for up/down/difficulty/whatever. Further adding to the visual confusion is the stack of icons that runs up the side of the page. Some of them duplicate the stuff that appears in the route information box (level, difficulty), some of them show what stuff appears on the map (strenous bits, pubs, views etc – probably the most useful) and others seem largely redundanr – the icon that tells you how far apart the contour lines on the map are, the ones that say that the ride contains climbs and descents and so on.

While we’re niggling, we might as well deal with the whole bilingual thing. Possibly uniquely, the Bike-Fax guide contains both English and Welsh text. Nothing wrong with that, but some pages have an English column and a Welsh one and some have one column with alternate English and Welsh paragraphs. It’s all the same colour, though, so we kept finding ourselves trying to read the wrong bits.

It’s still pretty good, though – the maps are easy to follow once you’ve looked past the Smarties and the descriptions are clear once you’re reading them in your native tongue. And you’re getting a healthy selection of routes, too.

The CD answers some of the criticisms of the book. It’s essentially the same content in easily-navigable PDF form – you actually get a bit more, as there are five bonus routes on there, plus some wallpaper images to brighten up your desktop. It asks you if you want English or Welsh before you start, which gets rid of that confusion straight off, and the contents page lists the routes not only by area but also by grade. Clicking on a route name takes you to the description, which is reformatted on to landscape A4 pages – one for the summary, one for the map and one for the directions. They’re considerably clearer than the book pages, in fact – being black text on white and having more space to breathe. It’s all designed to be easily printable, and Bike-Fax can sell you waterproof paper too.

Positives: Plenty of routes, good variety, good descriptions. CD has useful indexing and good clarity

Negatives: Fussy maps and bilingual confusion in book, no listing of routes by grade

Verdict

Bike-Fax’s Snowdonia guide is a good book, but we feel it’s been ever-so-slightly overdesigned. It’s made life hard for itself by being bilingual – we’re not going to criticise it for that, but the presentation of the same copy in two languages could have been better handled, and it all ends up slightly cluttered. The PDFs on the CD are considerably clearer and it’s easier to find what you want, although obviously not so good for browsing through or taking away for the weekend. The book makes up for any presentational shortcomings with a great route selection, though.

Performance: 4/5
Value: 4/5
Overall: 4/5