Route description
Kauppi is an area in Tampere mostly covered by forest. It offers a wide range of sport opportunities for residents of the city.
There are also many different levels of trails in the forest, which are also ideal for mountain biking. Most of these trails are
technically difficult, so beginners might prefer to head to Nokia or Ylöjärvi instead. However, if you love technical trails and challenging your riding skills, then Kauppi will offer you excellent opportunity for it.
The route starts from the parking lot at Kaupinpuistonkatu 1, 33500 Tampere. Here you can leave your car for the duration of your ride. The car park is only a few hundred meters away from the Kaupinoja beach, where you can relax after a mountain biking session.
This mountain biking route has been created in a way that you can first test your riding skills by mountain biking through a short three-kilometer loop. You can then decide if the level of technicality is right for you. If this is not the case, you can easily turn back to the parking lot or ride one of the area’s fitness tracks. Again, if you do enjoy the challenge of the first kilometers – you will surely also love the remaining route.
Right from the start, the route is technically challenging. Narrow single-track, roots and rock gardens will ensure that your average speed will not grow too high. If you will navigate using the GPS-track from MTBreitti, I recommend placing a navigation device or mobile phone on the handlebar, as there are multiple trails constantly crossing each other in Kauppi. Thus, keeping on the right route might be challenging. At around 2.5 kilometers you arrive to the first stopping point – the shore of Näsijärvi Lake. Unfortunately, there is no shelter nor fireplace here, but the views are pretty nice.
The route continues as a technical singletrack from here forward. There will be only few short transitions between along the fitness paths. At four kilometers, the mountain biking route arrives back to Lake Näsijärvi and from now on it starts to follow the lake shore for the next four kilometers. Sometimes the path goes deeper into the woods, as the shore areas are restricted in certain places (e.g. housing, construction work). In this section, the trails are mostly technical, there are a lot of roots and rock gardens on the route. I do not recommend riding this route in rainy weather, because the wet roots are very slippery. This lake shore section can also be muddy during spring and autumn.
At around eight kilometer mark, the route turns south towards the Alasjärvi Lake. The next three kilometers are less technical, but here you will not reach too high average speed either. At the end of the section there is a great resting place at the shore of Lake Alasjärvi.
From Alasjärvi the route turns west, and the next 5.5 kilometers it will follow mainly technical singletrack . There will be plenty of rock-gardens and roots to test your technical riding skills. There will also be a transition section following a fitness route, but it is only a few hundred meters long. The route ends at the same parking place next to the Kaupinoja beach.
Overall, I can recommend this route to the experienced mountain bikers who want to test their technical skills and equipment on the rooty and rocky singletrack sections.. Full-suspension bike is certainly superior in Kauppi, in case you prefer riding on the singletracks and not on the fitness routes.
If you want to get to know the routes of the Tampere region better, then in this route service you can take a look at the difficulty levels of different trails beforehand, and choose a suitable route option for yourself.
