an fyi, farside/highside/highline/ibt-ampm is about a one hour loop, at a casual pace
edit, highline from cheak lake road is a climb, but it's not overly hard.
Haha!! No way im doing that in an hour. You are a different version of fit than me, with out doubt. I would guess that the IBT trail head took about 40 minutes. Maybe a bit less. I prefer farside over the road. It is a perfectly good bit of easy super smooth warm up, in the shade, with a cool suspension bridge to gawk at for a minute. My guide was patient but i did not make him wait that much until the meat of IBT sections. Once you are up on IBT sections and get to the view points you cant deny that there has been some elevation gained.
Now for IBT: Wow. What a trail. For me, every punchy climb i made it up was a huge reward. I had to walk a few, some i blew and some i just needed to rest a bit. The section after teh am/pm junction was what i thought was the hardest. There were many challenges that i can go back and hope to conquer.
There was one hard right rock face that i took the ride around on, and some spots that i had to inspect before i got around the mental aspects and ride. Some where momentum moves with trials moto rock like climbs that rewarded you with another face to descend. It was a very rewarding trail. As my buddy said, "trust the berm."
The more i see trails like this,the more i am in awe of the pure artistic aspect to building a trail like this. My guide commented on it as well. "I dont know how some one just envisions and creates a trail like this out of raw mountain forest?" He was bang on. This builder was an adventurous engineer, a craftsmen, a skilled outdoors-man (like topo maps, flannel shirt, beards,axes and saws), an artist, a tireless worker. That is just the build part. Any one who rides the trail and cleans it all is a damn good,fit rider. :clap::clap::clap: