Conor Macfarlane's Backcountry Mission

I’m always on the lookout for new places to build features. The longer I’ve been doing this, the further away from home we end up and the harder it becomes to find new and unique challenges to ride. The furthest feature from home in this video is the drop at the end. It is about an hour and a half drive from the nearest cell phone service, which had me thinking about the risks of an injury being that far from help. Guess you just have to trust yourself sometimes.

I was hoping to have a month or so to film the video but these things just don’t always work out exactly as planned. Just before Crankworx Rotorua, I injured myself which took me out for six weeks. I had only one week before surgery and no time to get used to the new bike (I had just started riding for Commencal). To my delight, it took just one ride on the bike and we were ready to get into the meat of it. Thankfully, everything ended up working out really well. We battled the weather with big ruts forming on takeoffs after each run but it was nothing a spade couldn’t fix.

I'm looking forward to getting home soon and scoping out some more features to build...freeride is always a good excuse to go camping!

Huge thanks to Scott Robb for always being stoked to film with me and big ups to FSA for always being there for me and my bikes. I've run the full range of FSA components on all my rigs for about 10 years now, cheers for the confidence in me guys! - Conor Macfarlane