Chamonix Bike Blog

Tag: Pila

Backpacks in the bikepark // Pila

Ninety six percent of the human body is made up of just four elements; carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen*. As best science can currently tell us, the only way to form these elements is inside a star. The nuclear alchemy at the centre of a distant supernova, eons ago, created these atoms and flung them out across space. In the void of the galaxy, their tiny gravitation forces slowly drew them to other elements. Greater objects exerted greater draws and eventually they were pulled on the fused ball of spacedust we know as earth. Over further millennia these same atoms formed the building blocks of increasingly complex organisms. Bacteria, virus, plants, fishes, mammals. Finally, in 2020, these bits of actual stardust, form us.

With such an improbably fantastic heritage inside us, what have we been inspired to achieve? Mixed bag really. After that amazing journey to arrive where we are you’d think it would be easy enough to accept science as it is, you wouldn’t have folk claiming the earth is flat, that people of slightly different skin colour deserve to die on a beach, 5g gives you coronavirus and vaccines aren’t tested, all because it sounds too complex, too improbable. But we do, blame the solar system.

There’s been some good stuff too.

Like Italy.

Coffee, ice cream, stylish engineering and Pila bikepark. These four elements may not be as vital to life on earth as C, H, N and O, but they compliment them well.

So Pila, yeah, it’s all that.

Unfortunately I only really get to ride the lower section due to summer work clashing with opening dates but with the selection of atoms know as SARS-CoV-2 limiting that, best make hay whilst the sun shines.

Which obviously it always does in Aosta.

The bikepark gets all the attention on the socials, and it is right good with some new to me trails and features since I last lapped the Chamole chairlift in 2018, but if you can handle the fashion faux pas of wearing a backpack in the bikepark then the stuff you explore to from the lifts but outside the tape is every bit as good…

Traverse from the top of the Chamole chairlift along a newly built blue flow trail and you’ll quickly arrive at the Couis 1 chair. Assuming it’s running (it closes Sunday 23rd this year) and you’ll then slowly arrive at the top.

Really slowly.

Took us 30 mins bottom to top, so it’s just as weel the views are good. They get even better at the summit as the Cogne valley unveils itself below and your eyes get drawn to the ridgeline stretching out towards Aosta town.

You can ride that ridgeline, and if you like ridgelines you should. Then you too can take photos like these.

You need to make choices though, turn off left to ride to Cogne (we didn’t), keep going all the way along the ridge to join walking trails 23 and 21 to the valley floor (again, we didn’t, you had to climb a bit, too hot for that game), or turn off right to rejoin the Desarpa trail that winds it’s way back to Pila for more coffee and more fun.

After dingying a climb at 2600m altitude, we instead climbed from the top of the Chamole chair at 2300m. The air was a bit denser, or we were. Either / or.

It’s just a short climb to the Lago Chamole though, then another short climb onto the Testa Nera ridgeline. Definitely got a thing for ridgelines these days.

Again we eschewed the classic choices for a bit of exploring. Where normally you’d turn right for long descending adventure or left for a quick and enjoyable return to the lifts, we went straight.

Then wandered about in circles a bit, turned around, went back to the junction, tried going straight 10 meters further to the left, and found what we were looking for.

Unfortunately it seemed no one else had been looking for a while as the trail was a wee bit overgrown and unloved. A shame as the basic shape of it was classic Aostan gold but them’s the breaks.

And it really wasn’t too shabby where it wasn’t too shrubby.

Assorted trails later we were at the valley floor, where it was too hot to hang about so headed straight back up again and stayed up high until the lifts closed and we figured we’d have to head for home.

Via ice cream obviously.

Pila; we are stardust, we are golden.

All pictures of me taken by Toby, on his bloody phone! All pictures of Toby taken by me on a Sony RX100 which I’ve gone back to playing with the dials on and as a result most shots are out of focus, over/under exposed, too grainy/too blurred. it’s a learning process.

*Of course, these elements don’t just create life, they can destroy it too. Take the next major threat to life you’re going to be hearing lots about: dihydrogen monoxide. A clear, tasteless acid which turns up in nuclear waste, acid rain, fossil fuel power plant fumes and even in human cancers. It can corrode metal and rock, and is thought to be responsible for the deaths of over 350,000 people a year, yet is found in most food stuffs and drinks. There’s several petitions desperately trying to raise awareness and get this poison banned, hopefully at least one will get some traction somewhere.

20/08/2020
A day in Italy

There are many odd questions you get asked living in Chamonix. Where’s the lift to the Mont Blanc? Is it pronounced Chamonix or Chamonix? Are you a skier or snowborder? Which do you prefer; summer or winter? If you could only do biking or skiing; which?

Obviously these aren’t questions people are interested in the answer to, it’s just humans wanting to avoid silence and keep the distractions going, but the “if you could only…?” questions always intrigues me. Like, what freak scenario are you imagining that will leave the circumstances that would create only being able to ski OR bike?

I mean, obviously we’ve created a freak scenario where the alps might be snowfree within many of our predicted lifetimes, but apart from that…

Bearing in mind the impending environmental doom, was this acceptable? Some exceptionally rough calculations later (Renault trafic producing average 198g/km, Chamonix to Chamonix round trip 170km) I think we fired out 33.66kg / C02 in total, about 3.7kg / C02 pp.

This is equivalent to about 31 km commuting (single occupant at an EU new car average of 120.4g/km the average EU commute being 28.56km ), 26 minutes heliskiing (based on the Eurocopter AS350 B2 with 5 passengers [so including the guide, not including the pilot] but VERY roughly [turns out C02 emissions for helicopters are quite complex so this is probably under] so more than one drop, but not including your drive there from home), or a very very short distance of flying, like a really really short distance. I couldn’t find 2 airports close enough together to give an example but feel free to find something to prove me wrong!

This just gives some numbers to what we did, it doesn’t say if it’s acceptable. That’s up to you to decide. Is anything fair game in the pursuit of enjoyment or do we have to accept that all our actions will have a negative impact and we should stop breathing? I don’t know, but I know I feel less guilt that if we’d hopped in the spare helicopter. I can tell I’m losing you.

Anyways, the answer is generally thus. The average day biking is better than the average day skiing, but the best days on bikes don’t come close to the best days on skis. And the best season is the one you’re in.

So in the middle of winter, in a period of average ski days, Ollie’s message to say it’s his birthday and he’ll bike if he wants to was most welcome.

Load a van and head to Aosta.

Because in Italy it’s always sunny, the trails always dusty, the coffee always perfect.

Aosta riding then. There seems to be a very Italian thing that lends itself to shuttles. Assorted sizes of roads weaving up the hills across the country, all with a convenient lay-by, pull in, kerb or dirt shoulder to stop a (invariably) Renault trafic and trailer in, and a cracking bit of singletrack just alongside.

On a crisp, sunny January morning it was hard to think of a better place to be. Cafe stop to start, foccacia and pizza in the bags for lunch then up the hill to the first drop off of the day.

Obviously with a trailers worth of bikes (every bike a different brand, 3 wheel sizes, 3 frame materials, we’re a diverse group of white western males) that hadn’t been used for a couple months there was some faffage (1 punctured tyre, 1 punctured brake hose. Not a bad score for a days riding, good guy award goes to Emile for lending his shiny new Starling out to Martin so he didn’t have to skip the rest of the day), but not too much. A few more minutes for the obligatory pees-with-a-view, can anyone remember how to wheel and who’s got a new bike and can we all bounce up and down on it to marvel at how plush fresh suspensions feel like, and we were ready to drop.

As 2020 has gone in heavy on the dry January front, the trails were running great. Dusty yet with enough winter frost glue deeper in the dirt to give grand grip. The leaf free trees let plenty of low sunlight through, sunglasses obligatory for much of the day. If you forgot that you were wearing a down jacket you could be fooled into thinking it was summer.

Maybe.

If you’re the gullible sort.

Ride down to the pick up, load up, back up, see who’s driving back down, repeat. Not quite as catchy as eat, sleep, ride repeat, but about as accurate.

Not that every down was the same. Even when repeating the trails, the introduction of the “leader can’t cut” rule lead to surprisingly carnage free free for all down the most multi optioned trails. There’s something to be said for trying to ride a trail whilst staying on someones rear wheel, and simultaneously looking where the trails goes but checking where the trail doesn’t and you should. Who said we canny multi task.

This wasn’t quite the strava cut fest you’re imagining. Above Saint Christophe is such a maze of trails that you can criss cross your way down the hill, all on a different line but all going in the same vague direction. Best to look uphill as you come into some of the junctions though, the Red Arrows ain’t got shit on some of our formations…

Not every uplift was the same either. The highest point of the day was reached by pedal power, Renault Trafic’s can only climb so much ice. Worth it for the trail but.

Basically, it was a day spent taking the piss out of each other, riding in trains at questionable safe distances whilst taking the piss out of each other, and standing about in the sunshine taking the piss out of each other. It’s the formula for a grand days biking and goes some way to explaining why the average day’s riding is so much better than the average day on snow.

Now, who’s birthday’s next…

18/01/2020
Anything for an easy life.

Do you want it all, and do you want it now? Genuine achievement just takes so damn long and so much effort. Wouldn’t it be easier just to want something then get it with out all the hard work inbetween?

Well, aye, it would. So rather than put the long miles in getting ourselves back to biking fitness and riding our way into some sort of form, we’ve just looked at where we can hop on the lift and get dropped off at the top of the hill instead.

First stop. Pila.

Through the tunnel, past the open border and into Italy. Pila should be 45 minutes drive from Chamonix, but for some reason every trip there involves getting lost in the maze of streets surrounding the lift station. We got there in the end. Obviously. There wouldn’t be a post here if we were still trying to achieve escape velocity from the city.

For the enormous outlay of 3 euros, you and your bike can be lifted up 800m to the Les Fleurs station. For the cost of a cappuccino more you can go 400m higher to the Pila ski area, which we did on our first lap then didn’t bother with afterwards. The first few hundred meters of the trails are still under snow and really not worth the hassle.

Back to Les Fleurs and a short ride/push up the hill outside the lift station, followed by a couple minutes coast along the road, gets you to the main Pila Bike Park home run. Keep going along the road and you’ll find walking trails dropping down to your left which deliver varying degrees of interest, varying on your early season tolerance to damp greasy rocks…

The park trails are in pretty good condition just now. A few braking bumps but nothing terrible. A couple trees down but easy passed. No dust but, wait, what!?! No dust is a first for all of us in Pila.

Next day next venue. Chamonix to Verbier is less distance yet longer time driving than the trip to Pila, but still easy under the hour to Le Chable. Like Pila you usually go skiing by parking in a huge valley base car park, taking a lift to the ski area, then another lift to the skiing. Hence, the bikers get to use that first stage lift then drop back down to the valley floor. Simples.

Unlike Pila, the lift doesn’t cost 3 euros a go. But if you’ve got a Chamonix season pass you can use one of your wee free vouchers. Free. How often do you hear that in Switzerland?

There is still a wee bit of snow on some of the highest trails from Verbier town, so we were dropping down a couple hundred meters on road first before traversing onto some summer guiding favourites. Nuthouse, Church, Comfort Zone. Grand to be back out on the trails I worked on last year with the rest of the Bike Verbier crew, even if we probably spent more time standing in the sun chatting than riding. Surely all these games are just about the people not the sport itself?

Where else? Les Arcs ticks the valley floor base / ski area shuttle lift box, and it’s open until 28th April. Then there’s La Saleve. Open all year (well, except when they’re fixing it, what is it with France and broken telepheriques?) and rumour has it there’s been lots of digging going on there.

In an ideal piece of narrative one of these would form the third tangent of the triptych, neatly tying three countries worth of riding together and letting me make all sorts of subtext about different places achieving the same thing. This isn’t the ideal though. The weather wasn’t looking so inspiring and I kinda wanted to go skiing still and there’s work to be done around the flat and, and, and. Honestly, why is everything so much effort?

17/04/2019
Pila. Pinning/pining.

A long time ago in a galaxy (small highland town) far,
far away….

The first copy of “Dirt the downhill mountain bike magazine” arrived, some time later than it did in the rest of the UK as that’s generally what happens when you live in the north of the UK. For a bunch of kids who were doing a mix of BMX and motocross on bikes totally unsuited to the job at hand, and definitely not wearing lycra, it was a revelation that there were actually other people like us. All over the place.

Obviously we all started buying Dirt.

Several issues in (canny mind how far in, it’s not important anyway) there was an article about a bunch of riders deciding that the southern English DH races were shite (and they were back then) so piled in a van and drove to Pila to race a round of the Italian series.

That seems pretty reasonable now, but back then it was unheard of. If you were the best of the best at DH then obviously you spent much of the summer driving about the alps to race the Grundigs (and get drunk and smash stuff like a true Brit abroad), but the idea that as a normal rider you could just head off and ride this amazing terrain straight off a lift (this was before the Nevis Range DH was accessed by the lift, you still had to push up) was a revelation.

But there was more to it than that. There was the idea that bikes, DH bikes, weren’t just something you did at the weekend or as a kid, but a lifestyle like skiing or climbing. I’d always known that getting out the country and heading to the mountains for the winter was a perfectly sensible thing to do, now I’d had the epiphany that you could do that for the summer too.

A lot has changed since then. My #enduro bike is years ahead of any DH bike of that time, Dirt has just ceased publication. I now spend most of my summer riding some of the best trails in the world as and when I want to.

And now I’ve finally gone to Pila.

It was a long time coming, year after year I would be planning to go only to get injured, break the bike or, most frequently, the Mont Blanc tunnel be too busy. The blog’s even made it there before I did. But finally, I’ve made the 40 kilometre drive from Chamonix and caught the closing day of the 2015 Pila summer.

For 7 short hours Lorne, Sandy and I lapped and lapped and lapped the bike park, both the shorter (500m descent) upper chairlift accessed main park and the lower (1150m descent) home runs. We even failed to stop for coffee during the day which, for a trip to ride in Italy, is probably a first (and the only low point of the day).

I’m not going to describe the trails, it’s boring to write and worse to read, and Lorne did a good enough job after his first visit. Also we never really knew what trail we were on they all cross so much. But…I will make mention of the IXS DH track as it’s without doubt the hardest ‘official’ bike trail I’ve ridden if you stick to the quick lines, and probably even if you don’t.

I’ve new found respect for the strength of DH rims and tyres, absolutely nae idea how you can land in some of the rock gardens at any speed without writing off the wheels. Pretty much anywhere else something that hard would be closed most of the time, but if it’s not hard how can you progress? Talking of which, was pretty cool to see so many weans out on the trail and riding fast. Though what do you aspire to when this is your local hill?

Anyway, thanks Dirt for opening my eyes to another life all those years ago, I’m off to price DH bikes.

11/09/2015
Pila, Near Perfect

Well, Graham is out of action for now with a thumb injury and currently 72km into his 100km ultra marathon (yeah, sounds no fun to me either), so he asked me (Lorne Cameron) to do a spot of guest blogging of any big biking days for the time being. I’m not as good with the biking words as Graham, but here we go anyway for yesterday’s roadtrip to Pila in the Italy’s Aosta Valley, just 45 minutes’ drive from Chamonix through the Mont Blanc Tunnel.

A few friends here rave about Pila, but Spence and I had never been before and Nina only once or twice. Parking is easiest in Aosta town then access to the main bike trails is by a long gondola, with day passes costing €18 plus €5 refundable deposit for the lift pass card. The cafes up the hill are reportedly pretty good, but being cheapskates we brought sandwiches which we left in the car so that we could just split one backpack between us and make a run down to the car at lunchtime which worked out pretty well.

Things didn’t start off well with Spence somehow coating his rear disc in lube while tending to his chain, but luckily the mechanics at midstation were pretty friendly and gave him free-reign of the tool station to change his pads while coke and window cleaner got the disc cleaned nicely.

Up the main chairlift, we quickly realised what’s so special about this place. Imagine Morzine with less bumps, less crowds, more interesting trails and far more variations on the way down. There was a bit of everything to ride, from tall tight berms, singletrack, gaps, drops, northshore, the works. Rider’s left of the lift line and directly underneath it were pretty manicured trails, while far rider’s right had a much more natural feel but built up just enough to ride smoothly and the odd kicker scattered around and any bigger features very well marked with JUMP or DROP.

The photo of the map above shows the upper mountain trails, but if it included every little variation there would be twice as many lines marked (especially rider’s right), but with everything leading back to the chairlift it was really fun to find our own variations and regroup when the trails merged. We had one run down the IXS Downhill run which is all rideable for mere mortals such as ourselves, but it’s pretty scary to think that racers ride the whole very technical course flat-out without a break!

Laps off the top lift took us about 35-45 minutes depending on which variations we took, so we did 3 run up there before riding down to town for lunch which is an 18km run of not overly built-up trail with a lot of different variations through the wooded sections, excellent stuff. Staying left near the end on Nina’s recommendation gave us the best exit back to town then a 10 minute ride on the road back to the car – best to ride this with someone who knows the way to avoid getting lost.

After lunch, pretty much the same again finding new variations up high and getting to know some sections better so riding them much faster. The first few minutes of the trails rider’s right before everything started splitting were definitely my favourite; technical but flowy, exactly what I like.

So, definitely some of my favourite riding I’ve ever had. A very different feel to La Thuile, possibly overall better but unfortunately we didn’t make it to La Thuile this year so it’s hard to compare them directly.

Some sections were quite loose and dusty despite 36 hours of rain finishing two days before we were there, so best to ride Pila in moist conditions if possible with fresh tyres.

It’s pretty amazing that Pila isn’t talked about more or isn’t more popular with tourists – we only had to pass a few people all day and never got overtaken, but it was still easy to watch riders from the lifts including some very good locals. It’s definitely not a beginner-friendly resort though, and I wouldn’t take a hardtail anywhere near it. Some sections had quite bad brake bumps but Nina and I got on fine with 150mm all-mountain bikes; in early-season this wouldn’t be an issue at all.

Unfortunately Pila’s lifts stop running next weekend (8th September) so we might just have to take a return trip next Thursday!

30/08/2013