The Narcissist: A Brutal, Brilliant End to the First Morning Session
The Narcissist is a fittingly named trail. This Double Black Diamond run is steep, unforgiving, and truly tests your skills—it offers no sympathy for mistakes. It is a spectacular downhill track that starts with tight, rocky technical sections, demanding precision, before opening up into a high-speed, natural flow segment that rewards commitment. The trail is pure gravity bliss, featuring large drops, tricky off-camber sections, and plenty of places to get into trouble if your line choices are not spot-on.
As part of the extreme gravity cluster at the Mogo Trig Point, it is an essential challenge for any expert rider visiting the network. The roughly 760 metre descent is exhilarating and a massive hit of adrenaline. This wasn’t slated to be the grand finale of our first morning session, but the trail had other ideas—leading to one of those memorable mountain biking mishaps.
About halfway down the trail, Dan suffered a quick puncture, forcing him to hike the rest of the way. I continued down to the base to get help, only to hear the dreaded pfft right as I reached the bottom—a puncture for me too! The trail had successfully cut our riding session short.
Thankfully, the fantastic local support at Mogo is second to none. A huge thank you to Angus from Ride Mogo who came out with spare tyres to conduct a trailside repair. While he was fully prepared to get us back out there, we decided to prioritise our next session, which was scheduled just two days later. We opted to call it a day and save our remaining energy and equipment for our planned return.
Riding the Merida eONE-EIGHTY e-bikes (courtesy of Ride Mogo) certainly helps with the climbs, but not even the best design and colourful e-MTBs can save you from the sharp rocks of a double black descent! It remains one of our favourite tech-focused trails at Mogo, despite the incident.
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The Narcissist on Trailforks.com
