Your Route Is Built Around the Least Confident Rider in Your Group

When you book a private tour, you aren't really choosing a route. You're choosing a group — and the route follows from the group.

More precisely, it follows from one person in it: whoever has the least experience. Which trails we ride, how much climbing we do, where we stop, how long the day runs — all of it is decided downstream of that one input.

That catches people off guard, so it's worth laying out how it actually works. Not as a rule I impose, but as the arithmetic of taking a group of riders into the mountains with one guide.

There is no such thing as a group level

When a booking comes in saying "we're all intermediate," what I actually receive is one person's guess about four other people. It is almost never accurate, and the error always runs the same direction: upward.

It scales down, too — I've had the same thing with just two riders, one wanting the day to get sharper while the other had seen enough by halfway. But it does the most damage in groups of four, five, six. The more people you add, the higher the chance that one of them sits well outside the level the booking describes.

The route I plan is not built around the average of your group. It's built around the person in it with the least experience. That's not me being cautious for the sake of it — it's the only way the day works for everyone, including that person.

I spent twenty years in a sport where the plan was always built around the least experienced member of the group. Nobody argued about it there. The cost of getting it wrong was too obvious.

Two different scales, and they don't line up

There are two things people mean by "difficulty," and mixing them up causes real confusion on the trail.

The STS (Singletrail-Skala) — S0, S1, S2 and so on — describes a piece of trail: how technical the surface and the line are at that spot.

My tour grades describe an entire day: the climbing, the length, the exposure, the surface, how many hours you spend on the bike, how much of it is remote.

These are independent. A tour can be technically easy the whole way and still be graded Advanced, because of exposure, or altitude gain, or simply time in the saddle. I've had riders halfway up a route ask me, "So could you bring a beginner here?" — on trail that was S0. The answer was still no.

So don't reverse-engineer the day from an S number. Each tour has its own difficulty description: read it here, and read it for the tour you're actually considering.

"Can we split up? They'll take the trail, he'll take the road."

This one comes up from time to time, and the answer is no.

There is one guide. The moment a group splits, I stop seeing half of it — and that's where a chain of problems would begin, none of which I have any interest in testing in practice.

Say someone drops back. Is he fine, or did he take a wrong turn? I wouldn't know, because I can't see him. To go and look, I'd have to leave everyone else standing somewhere on a mountain — and "everyone else" could easily include kids, who don't tend to stay put once the guide has ridden out of sight. At that point I'd be searching for two groups instead of one.

That has never happened on one of my tours, and it isn't luck. It's the reason the answer to this request is no.

Five minutes apart is the same problem as forty minutes apart. The difference is only in how bad the consequences get.

There's also a simple geometry issue: the trail and the safer road frequently go in different directions, down different sides of the mountain. "We'll meet at the bottom" often isn't a place that exists.

This is also part of why the difference between a private tour and an open group tour matters more than the headcount.

The e-bike trap

E-bikes have made mixed groups look far more compatible than they are.

The motor flattens out the difference in fitness almost completely. Everyone gets to the top together, everyone is fresh, everyone feels strong. So the group concludes it's homogeneous.

Then the descent starts, and the gap in bike handling is not only still there — it's wider than it would be on normal bikes. An e-bike is heavy and it forgives less. Speed builds faster, braking takes longer, and a mistake costs more.

Same watts uphill does not mean same skill downhill.

If you're choosing a rental for a mixed group, the bike itself matters too: hardtail or full-suspension changes how forgiving the descent feels.

The route is locked when it's planned, not at the trailhead

People assume a guide can adjust on the fly in both directions. It doesn't work symmetrically.

Escape routes and easier alternatives only exist where the route was planned to have them. On some tours I can shorten, bail out onto a road, or drop a descent. On others there's nowhere to go but forward.

Upgrading is even harder. If a group turns out to be stronger than described, I can't insert real technical terrain that isn't on that mountain — and I won't put a rider on something they aren't prepared for just because the rest of the group is bored.

Which means the whole day is committed to the least confident rider at the moment I plan it, not at the moment we meet.

The regroup tax

On a half-day tour, a mixed group spends a serious amount of time simply waiting and regrouping — enough to change the shape of the day.

And there's a cruel detail in that: the slowest rider gets the least rest of anyone. He arrives at the regroup point last, everyone else has been standing there recovering, and the moment he rolls up the group moves off again. The strong riders rest. He never does.

Who actually has the worst day

It's easy to assume the fast riders are the ones losing out. They're bored — that's real, but it's mild.

The person having a genuinely bad time is the one at the back. He's frightened, he's exhausted, and — worst of all — he's embarrassed. He can feel four people waiting for him at every corner. He gets told to walk a section, and now everyone is watching him walk it.

That combination is also where crashes come from. Not from a hard section — a tired, rattled rider usually crashes on something easy, a few minutes after the part that scared him.

Two honest options

This is a compromise either way. Choose which compromise you want.

Option one: build the group first, then book. Ride with the people who want the same day you do. Similar skill, similar appetite. The tour is then built for that, and it's the version of the day everybody remembers.

Option two: book as you are, and accept what that means. Bring the mixed group — that's completely fine, and plenty of my best days are family days. But come with your expectations already adjusted: the route will be chosen for the least confident rider, we'll take the safer line, and there will be sections where we stop and wait. If that's the day you're expecting, you'll enjoy it. If you're expecting the other day, you won't.

What doesn't work is choosing option two and hoping for option one.

What can be done inside a mixed group

There are a few things that genuinely help, and I'll use them where the terrain allows:

• Short optional loops within sight. The stronger riders take a harder line that comes back to the same point, while everyone else waits somewhere pleasant. Nobody leaves the area, and I can see everybody.
• Repeating a descent. The strong riders ride a section twice while the others rest — same trail, same place, no split group.

What I can't do is add a shuttle or a lift that wasn't planned in advance, or bring a second guide. It's one guide, one group, one route.

Or book two different days

If the gap inside your group is genuinely wide — say four of you ride regularly and two have barely touched a mountain bike — the cleanest answer isn't to compromise at all. It's two tours on two different days.

One day for the riders who want it hard. And a second day built around the less experienced ones: not a watered-down version of the first route, but a day chosen for them, at their pace, with the parts that will actually make them fall in love with riding here. They get their own tour instead of an endurance test of somebody else's.

To be clear, this is about groups, not about splitting up couples or families. If there are two of you, the shared day is planned for whoever is less confident — and if the stronger rider still wants something rougher, that's simply another tour on another day, on their own.

Not sure? Just ask

You don't need to fill in a questionnaire or grade every person in your group. But if you're looking at a tour and you're not sure whether it fits everyone — or you're not sure you're reading the difficulty description the same way I would — send me a message on WhatsApp before you book.

Tell me who's coming and what they've ridden recently. It takes two minutes, and I'll tell you honestly whether that tour is the right one, whether a different route fits better, or whether you'd be better off with two separate days.

That conversation is the difference between a tour you tolerate and one you talk about afterwards.