About Fat Tyre- and the guides

Queenstown's only mountain bike guiding specialists - we're born and breed local riding enthusiasts and we're here to show you the thousands of kilometres on thousands of hectares of private high country sheep farms and conservation land we have access to.  Well away from the crowded trails close to town.

We don't guide where you can ride to yourself with out getting lost!

Fat Tyre Adventures burst into existence in 2001 when owner/operator Greg McIntyre could no longer contain his passion for mountain biking and took a leap to start his own guiding business. New Queenstown undisputed mountain bike guiding experts setting the standard for delivering the best mountain biking Queenstown has. 

Queenstown, New Zealand - Mountain biking

Either Helicopter in or drive in, our ultimate objective is to offer our riders the best ride they’ve ever had! 

We have private and Department of Conservation land concessions on five different mountain ranges giving us the ability to access rides that no one else can. The trails are mostly very natural with amazing scenery, a range of rocky steep, narrow trails or fast open smooth trails with the odd cow and sheep (it is New Zealand!). On the ‘gravity’ trails the descents are huge -with some offering over 1800m of down.  These trails could be the best trails you have ever ridden.

 Fat Tyre mountain bike guides.

Being a mountain bike guide is not just about being a great rider-in fact we at fat tyre put being able to guide, manage risk, communicate at a high level, know about 400km of trails, assess rider expectations and deliver the expectation, have wilderness first responder emergency care training, fix bikes on the trail, load helicopters, drive customers and then they have to be solid competent riders-FIRST. We do not rant about our guides being bike racers- we are guides!

Then there is being a real kiwi and solid roots in Queenstown- not a seasonal traveler.

Greg McIntyre.
Owner and guide.

 Rides a Yeti 575.  

 
Greg is well travelled and well aware of the hassles and frustrations of not getting to the heart of an area or mountain bike trail area. His twenty years mountain biking in the Southern Lakes of New Zealand qualifies 'Fat Tyre Greg' to deliver the most amazing trails on offer in this special part of the planet. These trails are the ones that you will not find on your own.
  
Greg is a founding member and mountain bike spokesperson for Cycle Tour Operators New Zealand (CTONZ) and now assesses for the NZ standards organisation training trainers to teach riders to be guides.

Mark Nickolls 

Mountain bike guide.

Rides a Giant Trance- wants a Yeti SB66 (when his wife will let him?)

Hailing from Auckland’s East Coast Bays; Mark saw the light and moved south to Arrowtown after meeting his southern girl Jude in Scotland.

Mark is well travelled visiting 30 countries on four different continents before his 30th Birthday.

Now father to twins Taylor & Jake, Mark spends his time raising his young family & rides as often as he can, “getting into the hills” as he likes to call it.

 “The Southern Lakes area is amazing for backcountry riding; you can leave home and be in the hills in minutes riding for hours with out seeing anyone, surrounded by some of the best scenery in the world”.

Marti Smith

Mountain bike guide

Rides a GT Force 2

Marti have a few claims to fame- but there is not enough room to write them in this paragraph. But one of them is that Marti was one of the pioneers of mountain biking in Queenstown, working in a bike shop when most people thought fat tires' were a fad, then being one of the  first mountain bike guides in New Zealand guiding on the Skippers pack track- now and easy ride to do your self.

Marti is a third generation Queenstown local.

---

Sustainability.
Where possible, we buy local. Our styley biking merchandise comes from a Christchurch based company and our t-shirts are printed in Queenstown. We grow our own veges and feed the scraps to the hungry worms in the work farm.  World famous in NZ, we offer Em's power cookie as trail snacks - both 100% pure kiwi hearty health bar. If we visit a café at the end of a ride, we go local and of course, we always drink local beer and wine.

---

Recycling.
With Greg’s Scottish and Ange’s Dutch blood, our home and office is a veritable recycling mecca – even the bike inner tubes are recycled into tree ties and our worms love chomping their way through old invoices and egg cartons.