As if hosting a number of the 2025 Mountain Bike World Championships disciplines wasn’t enough already, Aletsch Arena will also be the main venue for the trail.summit 2025 and the DIRTT trail building assessor training. A full packed, triple treat, taking place in the first week of September.
2025 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships.
Valais will host two weeks of mountain biking competition, from 30 August to 14 September 2025, bringing together, for the first time, all eight mountain bike disciplines in a single host region. Two MTB disciplines of the 2025 World Championships will take place at the Aletsch Arena/ Bellwald, the Enduro & e-Enduro (finals September 1st) and the e MTB cross-country (finals September 4th).
Starting the 2nd of September, the trail.summit 2025 forms a thematic bridge between the strategic bike project “Valais/Wallis” and its regional master plans and the staging of the World Championships – with the aim of highlighting and demonstrating sustainable trail development, successful cooperation, and quality as key success factors. The trail.summit is an excellent international network meeting for people working in the trail development sector.
Day one will include a range of international speakers while addressing 3 pillars of successful MTB infrastructure: Access & Governance, Financing Operations & Value Creation and User Experience & Innovation. The second day will focus on regional MTB planning as a driving force, using the example of the canton of Valais, in combination with various parallel sessions and practical field visits
DIRTT assessor training
After the trail.summit, the Aletsch Arena will host a group of Swiss and international trail experts who will complete the final stage of their trail building assessor training as part of the European DIRTT project. This first group of assessors will play a key role in the implementation of Europe’s premier trail building certification program.
Various new trail projects are under development in the Aletsch Arena, which makes it the perfect training ground for the candidate assessors to observe and evaluate the skills and competences of trail builders on a live project.
While job certification is common practice in larger and more mature industries, the trail building sector is relatively young and in many EU countries still in its early stages. That’s why trail building lacks a system for competence verification and certification. A void that is filled by means of the DIRTT project.
At the core of the certification program lies the European competence framework for mountain bike trail building, the standard for the competences needed in the sector serving as a much-needed yardstick for quality assurance of the competence held by the people working in the sector.
Trail building certification will have several advantages, both for the builder, the customer, and the end user. It offers transparency for the customer and will lead to job recognition and the trail builder’s qualifications, allowing him/her to distinguish themselves within the sector. The customer will know that the certified trail builder delivers high-quality work and will comply with safety regulations and a wide spectrum of sustainability principles. This will support the further professionalization and responsible growth of the recreational trails sector. For the end user, this results in a product that is better tailored to the experience sought by the intended type of rider and a design that does justice to rider dynamics.
photo credits © Aletsch Arena AG