This weekend (11/12 July), Sheffield’s Millhouses Park will host the 2009 Cliffhanger Festival, an epic gathering of all manner of outdoorsy stuff including a healthy slab of bikey things. Best of all, nearly everything at Cliffhanger is free once you’ve paid to get in, and that’s only a fiver (or nothing at all for kids).

On the bike side, there’ll be demos from trials aces Ben Slinger (former World Champion), Danny Butler (former European Champion) and others. They’ll also be running free coaching sessions for up to 10 riders at a time – first come, first served, so be quick.

There’ll also be a mini-Trailquest on Saturday, with local organisers Dark & White Challenge putting on a two-hour checkpoint challenge running out into the handily-adjacent Peak District. Entry is free, but you’ll need to contribute £1 towards third-party insurance costs and to be a member of the Trail Cyclists Association (also free if you sign up as an associate member – go to www.trailquest.co.uk for details). If you want to be sure of a place it’s best to enter in advance at www.darkandwhite.co.uk.

Dark and White is also a four-hour adventure race from the Cliffhanger site. It’s part of the DW4 series, and this one does have its own entry fee. Part of the event will be out in the hills, part within the festival itself, so there’ll be more people watching than adventure racers may be used to. Again, details are at www.darkandwhite.co.uk.

If you fancy brushing up your riding skills, head for Cliffhanger’s own timber trail, with CTC coaches and volunteers from SingletrAction and Recycle Bikes ready to help with a range of short skills clinics.

As well as that lot, we’d expect that many of the other events will be of interest to the typically fairly outdoorsy mountain bike demographic – there’s lots of climbing stuff, orienteering, fell running, tent displays, skateboarding, parkour, kite flying, scuba diving, caving and even a couple of more sedentary activities like angling and Crown Green bowling. Or just attempt to spot your house on the Ordnance Survey’s 1,584sq ft map of England and Wales. Plus many other things that we won’t list exhaustively here but instead point you towards www.cliff-hanger.co.uk at which full details of everything can be found…