Parents' Guide to Where the Trail Ends

WHERE THE TRAIL ENDS is a thrill to watch. It's shot with the incredible clarity of a nature documentary and uses a prominent, often high-octane soundtrack as a backdrop to what can only be described as epic jumps, twists, and flips. The athletes begin in Utah, where they've lost that loving feeling for the challenge of new terrain, and travel the world over to find fresh, often virgin patches of land reached only by helicopter to bike across. There's a lifestyle element here that's glorified, though: These are twentysomething men stoked on gnarly jumps, and although they're jazzed to see new cultures and peoples, their main fix is the adrenaline of new mountains and cliffs and outcroppings on which to test their mettle -- what someone in the doc calls the "dirt, the drops, and the hospitals" that distinguish one place from the next. They wipe out a lot but always get up. Although this is a real visual pleasure, viewers will not learn much about China or Argentina or Utah that can't be determined by the dustiness of the mountain soil. There's a bit of glorifying of the sport -- it's incredible that many of these athletes come off unscathed from terrifying altitudes -- so parents may wish to temper the awesome stunts against the real riskiness to life and limb it engenders.