OPINION: Mountain biking injuries are largely down to luck and riding outside your skill level.
Riders at Christchurch's new Adventure Park have suffered 150 injuries that required a hospital visit since it opened six weeks ago.
The amount of injuries has put pressure on the city's emergency health system, and five of the injuries were life-threatening.
So how dangerous is the sport of mountain biking?
I've ridden mountain bikes for more than 25 years, and I've only ever had one major accident, but it was a biggie, and it changed how I ride now.
It's important to note there are two main types of mountain biking: cross-country (the Olympic sport) and downhill.
The average Kiwi mountain biker partakes in basic trail riding, which is a sanguine version of elite-level cross-country biking.
Most of these riders don't do jumps or go very fast. There are few injuries from this particular type of mountain biking.
Downhill biking on the other hand is incredibly dangerous, and produces the great majority of mountain bike-related injuries - as does the offshoot sport of free-riding.
The new Christchurch Adventure Park caters mostly for downhill and free-ride bikers, which explains the high number of injuries suffered there since opening in December.
Chairlifts take the mountain bikers up the Port Hills much like a ski-field, so there is no actual uphill riding to be had - the park is all about going downhill with gravity.
Bikers at the park should be wearing body armour and a full-face helmet. If they're not, then they're bloody stupid.
Doing jumps can be bloody dangerous
My own major mountain biking accident happened 12 years ago at the Woodhill Forest Park near Auckland.
I'd literally biked the trails there for thousands of kilometres over the years, and knew just about every nook and cranny.
I'd also gone from being a trail rider to experimenting with doing jumps - this is where the danger levels ramped up significantly.
The biggest mistake you can make doing jumps on a mountain bike is not wearing a full-face helmet. I only had my usual trail riding helmet on when I crashed, but even this helped save my life.
My riding companion and I had reached the very end of our ride, and we were re-jumping a small ramp of about half a metre in height. It was very much a beginner's jump.
I'd popped it a dozen times in a row, and went back for one last go, believing I had mastered it.
On this final attempt, I mistakenly landed my back wheel first, and momentum threw me and the bike forward at pace, right into a tree that had a cut-off branch shaped like a spear.
Blink and you'll miss it
The branch barely missed my right eye by a centimetre, and tore into the side of head, ripping it open. If my helmet hadn't have impacted the tree trunk and borne the brunt of the impact, the branch would have likely ripped the right side of my face completely off.
Instead, my helmet exploded into pieces and sent my momentum back the other way, the branch exited my face as quickly as it had entered.
It was all over in a couple of seconds, I remember looking down at my hands and seeing them covered in blood that was being pumped out of my head.
My riding companion immediately put his hands over the wound to stop the blood flow.
"Jesus mate, I could see inside your face - I could see your cheek bone!"
I was incredibly lucky - not only because the branch had just missed my eye and had not entered my head near or into my brain - but also because the park's emergency centre was barely 100 metres from the site of the accident.
Imagine if I'd crashed many kilometres away on another trail?
Park staff called an ambulance, bandaged me up and made me comfortable, but unfortunately the ambulance driver got lost getting to the park and arrived an hour later.
I was taken to North Shore Hospital where a doctor patched me up.
First he cleaned out the bark fragments from the large hole in my head using a water pumping device, and then sewed up the wound like an artist. Thanks to this doctor's skill I don't have much of scar to this day.
My biggest mistake? Not wearing a full-face helmet. Had I been wearing one, my face would have been protected from the branch, and there would have likely been no wound.
That said, the branch could have still shattered my riding goggles and taken out my eye. It was all a matter of luck and the distance of millimetres.
Do I still do jumps when I go mountain biking?
No way. Once bitten, twice shy.
I still go biking, but always ride to my level and try to keep both wheels on the ground most of the time.
So that's one major accident in 25 years of mountain biking, and that one accident was purely down to bad luck and bad preparation.
Mountain biking is dangerous, but sometimes you don't realise that until you have a major accident - and I count myself incredibly lucky to still have my right eye.
There will be plenty more injuries at Christchurch's Adventure Park in the weeks and months to come, it just comes with the territory.
That said - they'll be plenty of rugby injuries in New Zealand this year as well.
