It’s no secret that the McCall, Idaho mountain bike scene is going off, and now the renowned destination is home to its own epic shuttle run. Thanks to the recent completion of the final missing link in 2023, mountain bikers can now descend over 2,800 vertical feet from the summit of Brundage Mountain on 12 miles of spectacular singletrack.
Brundage offers several bike park trails, but the shuttle run mentioned here heads out of the resort boundary and drops steeply to the Bear Basin trail system far below. Known as the Brundage to Bear Basin (B2BB) route, this linkup is quickly becoming renowned as “the best 12 miles of mountain biking in McCall.”
“The different sections of this trail have been built piece by piece over the past seven years,” according to a press release from Brundage Mountain. “The Brundage Mountain Bike Park opened the Lakeview Vista trail in 2019 and added Rock Garden in 2021, then CIMBA (Central Idaho Mountain Bike Association) spearheaded a coordinated effort to complete B2BB in 2023. All three trails are rated intermediate.”
Brundage Mountain is now offering an unusual mountain bike shuttle on the B2BB route. Instead of basing the shuttle at the bottom of the trail, the vehicle instead picks up riders at the lower West Face Parking Lot at at 9:30 am, 12 pm, and 3 pm on Wednesdays through Sundays to return them to the Brundage base area higher up the mountain. Brundage notes that “space is limited to four bikers per time slot and reservations are required a full 24 hours in advance.”
Yes, that means that riders will need to use both the vehicle shuttle and the chairlift to access this shuttle run, which seems quite complicated, slow, and potentially expensive.
The shuttle vehicle pickup costs just $20, but if you don’t already have a day ticket ($45) or season pass ($99), you can purchase the vehicle shuttle plus a single lift ride to the top of the mountain for $40. While this is a new experience for the McCall area, paying $40 for a 12-mile ride is fairly expensive in the grand scheme of mountain bike shuttles. It seems like the best way to ride the B2BB is as a $20 add-on to a full day of riding in the bike park. Tacking on a unique out-of-the-park enduro-style descent will make for a diverse day of mountain biking!
At this time, the limit of four riders per time slot might present a big limitation. It’s easy to envision all 12 spots filling on a busy Saturday. Hopefully, if this inaugural test goes well, Brundage will consider purchasing a bigger shuttle vehicle for future use.
