What does the mountain bike trail difficulty rating mean?

The difficulty rating for mountain biking routes has a great advantage: it avoids the trouble (or even damage to the ego). Indeed, having to get off and push the bike when you decide to take a route that is beyond your ability, when it was not planned, is usually at least a source of frustration.

The problem is that the rating is necessarily subjective depending on the environmental conditions (cold, wind, humidity, snow, etc.).

Mountain biking difficulty rating is a broad topic that has been a topic of discussion on the site's forums for years. The debate that led to the revision of the system following informed suggestions from the site's forum members also made alignment possible with VTTrack, which aggregates data from multiple sites such as UtagawaVTT.

Evaluating a course is not easy, there are dozens of ways to continue, so the choice of one or another system of criteria is an arbitrary choice. Alexi Righetti, mountain bike specialist and practitioner of very advanced routes, prepared a video for us so we can see it better. This is not what we use as the system at UtagawaVTT, but it is close and gives a good illustration of the types of terrain associated with different ratings.