Chamonix Bike Blog

Tag: verbier

Tour des Combins

Let me break the fourth wall on the way this blog works. Usually I’ve had an idea that’s been written down long before the ride happens. Sometimes the ride doesn’t go to plan and the idea doesn’t get used. Sometimes I have a better idea. As a result there’s a file on the laptop with unused stories covering subjects as diverse as “How much fucking up of the environment is considered OK*”, “How addictive is bike riding” and “How quickly did Capucin monkeys invent prostitution after being taught capitalism” (The answer to all these sort-of-questions is “very”).

I had an intro all lovely and written for this, then realised it was perfectly wrong. I like realising things.

So instead of a bit of a rant about how “Mountain Bikes” shouldn’t be called “mountain” bikes because really its “lower down the hill where the trails are interesting” bikes I’m just going to be happy about the idea of going into the hills with friends and enjoying being there**.

Because three of us went into the mountains, rode a route that we were fairly sure would be good, and had a generally grand time.

That route would be a variation on the Tour des Combins. The ‘Combins’ being the Grand Combin, one of Switzerland’s bigger hills, and the ‘variation on the Tour des’ bit is the classic Tour des Mont Blanc esque hut to hut walk with tweeks to make it betterer for bikes.

The first thing that made it betterer for bikes was Bike Verbier giving us a lift up to Bourg St Pierre to start the first climb of the day about 1000m higher than otherwise. If this seemed like a good idea at the time, it seemed like a bloody amazing idea by the time we were slogging up the final hill of the day to the Cabane Chanrion.

That’s in about 2500 meters time though, we had the initial thousand or so to go up to the Col du Mille first.

They went.

Eventually.

You go up to get down, and the down from the Col du Mille is a bit of a classic. Starting at over 2400m, you’ve got a lot of winding alpine singletrack to ride before you hit first shrubby plants then the tree line. Better, just as you’re getting to the tree line you hit one of the best sections of trail I know of. Nothing too technical, and there’s better backdrop elsewhere too, but it just hits all the right sizes of turn on just the right gradient to make something really memorable.

Down then up, well across more than up at first, but eventually up. First on tarmac to Mauvoisin, then gravel to the Mauvoisin dam, then tunnel to Lac Mauvoisin.

Aye, tunnel. With the normal valley floor trails being under 60 years of water you have to take a few km’s of tunnel along the side of the lake instead.

You canny say the riding’s not varied in the alps…

The climb keeps going up, the scenery keeps going up, the energy levels keep going down. Thoughts of missing the 18.30 feeding time at the refuge zoo keep entering my head, along with the first musings about e-bikes.

Forgive me father for I have sinned.

Turns out we needn’t have worried. As the Cabane Chanrion comes into view so does the hut guardian, stood atop a lonely peak scanning the horizon for his only 3 guests of the night.

Dinner at 7pm? Why that’ll do nicely sir.

This is pretty much where the original start to the tale fell apart. I should be talking about the trails and the riding and the differences but really, the best part was just beginning. Sitting outside in the sun(moon?)chairs watching the moon rise over the mountains and the stars get outpaced by the satellites had nothing to do with biking, we could have arrived on foot, skis or parapont and the experience would have been exactly the same. We have far more in common than which divides us I guess.

Another day with another sunrise and another litre of tea in the belly to hydrate. There are better starts to the day than a 400m singletrack descent out the front door, but not many.

There are better continuations of the morning than an 800m pedal and push to 2800m altitude, but not many.

More than the previous example however.

Passing through the Fenetre de Durand marks the literal and figurative high point of the trip, 2797m up and surrounded by high peaks and glaciers.

It actually arrives fairly easily, the hardest part of the climb by far is lower down, by the time you get to the last few km’s to the col the slope angle has eased off and the scenery cranked up to 11 to distract you even more.

Good col that.

The descent off the other side into Italy’s no bad either. Moonscape shale and deep deep turquoise lakes that are the thing of Yeti brand managers dreams. A final tech section through derailleur hungry rocks and you’re spat out into a high alpage and the start of a long balcon trail round to Etroubles. Really long. 14km or so with barely altering altitude through some of Italy’s best scenery. Bikes are good.

I’d had high hopes for the descent into Entroubles. After a summer of bike guiding where pretty much the whole point of riding is to go to places you know and have checked out before, this was going to be a dotted line on the map that I knew nothing about, could find nothing about, but that ticked all the right topographical boxes to give a classic Aosta valley singletrack descent.

It didn’t quite work that way. GPS said we were slap bang on the trail but the ground said otherwise. I’m pretty sure there was a trail there once, but I’m also pretty sure the dinosaurs were there once too. Dejectedly we kept picking our way down through open forest until a perfectly groomed trail appeared where no map said it should.

Keep following the map or strike out into the unknown?

The unknown worked out very well indeed.

The other thing that worked out very well, the trail ended in a small Italian village. Coffee time.

Caffeine is an interesting performance enhancing drug. It was also a welcome one at the start of 900m of tarmac climbing. We weren’t going quite to the top of the Grand St Bernard pass on the road, but a couple of sweaty hours later we weren’t much off it. Classic road bike cols are better done on road bikes would be my main conclusion from that.

Here Dave, on his carbon 29’er hardtail, decided that a better time would be had continuing over the col and descending by road back to Etiez. It was 5pm with 350m of hike-a-bike to the next col and a technical descent still to go. The appeal of travelling 20km without pedalling was too much… We waved Dave off, never to speak of him again. Sanny and I shouldered our bikes and started the plod to the Fenetre du Ferret.

Somehow I’ve never been to the Fenetre du Ferret before, but for a first time up there, arriving to early autumn golden hour on a perfect blue sky evening is about as good as it gets. Even with a chilly wind whistling over the rock and snow it was a happy place to be.

As we started the descent it got even happier. Some descents are memorable due to the situation, some the quality of the riding, some the sheer length of the descent. Dropping from the Fenetre du Ferret to La Fouly ticks all they boxes and more. Just a stunningly good ride in stunningly good scenery.

The ride could have continued. From La Fouly there’s the Tour du Mont Blanc trails along the valley floor, a couple of climbs can get you to some classic descents from around Champex Lac or above Orsierres, but it was getting dark and I was hungry. We hit the road and tucked for a very rapid return to Etiez, in the end the full descent, some 30km and 2000m disappeared in 80 minutes. If only all human progress could be so easy!

Cheers and hi-fives go out to Sanny and Dave for being (mostly) willing guinea pigs to the route, Alpavista, a fellow pictures and pontification rider/blogger who gives a breadcrumb trail of clues to put together over a bit of time with a map and educated guessing to help plan routes (except his pontifications are in French which does lend them a much more poetic air than I get). And Lucy and Phil at Bike Verbier who know every trail every where and are two of the best things to happen to mountain biking.

*You can enter a false email address to complete the test here and not worry about getting follow up guilt trips, the point’s more to make us think about just how much we have to change behaviour to live in a way 1 planet can support us.

**Keeping with the transparency theme, normally I get something written up and published within a few days of the ride. All this happened about 3 weeks ago but working riding my bike has got in the way of writing for free about riding my bike.

28/09/2019
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
Verbs

Verbs, as Massive Attack inform us (when oh when will they do a Sesame Street co-lab?), are ‘doing’ words, so this episode we are doing Verbier. Chamonix’s richer, better schooled, better looking (but not quite as talented….), cousin.

There’s a fair bit of winter rivalry twixt the two as to which is the better resort, with the Chamonix folks laughing at what Verbier calls “extreme”, the Bec du Rosses is just a fun wee ski out for us, whilst the Verbier crews get confused why Chamonerds take all they ropes and harnesses and crap out with them in their rucsac and just backflip over the problem whiles we’re still setting the abseil anchor or working out which foot to put the crampon on first.

Truth telt, both places are grand and, being an easy 50 minutes drive apart*, worth going to each of them.

Plus I’ve spent this summer working in Verbier, so it’s not like I’ve spent lots of time learning the trails there or anything.

Starting with the basics, the Verbier bikepark is mostly below the Verbier – Ruinettes lift, but there’s also bikes only trails over by the Savoleyres lift. A bikepark pass will set you back 31chf to 37chf and let you play on the Le Chable-Verbier-Ruinettes gondola, the La Chaux Express and the La Tzoumaz / Savoleyres gondolas which link Verbier and La Tzoumaz via Savoleyres.

In addition to the bikes only bikepark trails, there’s a wheen of “enduro” trails. Or trails as they’re otherwise known. If there isn’t a no bikes sign at the start then they’re generally well ridden. If there is a no bikes sign at the start, then riding them will cause all manner of issues for everyone else when it comes to bike access and general trail advocacy so best stick to the trails you can ride, it’s not like there’s a shortage of them.

If you stump up the extra few chf for the full 4 valleys lift pass then a whole world of possibilities opens up, kinda like how the Megeve/Les Contamines/St Gervais addition to Chamonix’s pass works. But you’d really need a guide for that…

Anyways, work is work and play is play. Lucky for me a few Chamonix friends have made the trip over when I’m not working at showing people around so I can spend my day off showing people around. It’d be a pretty dull bit of content if I just listed off trail names and descriptions for every trail we rode, but there are a few stand outs.

Margaret Thatcher. If you know where to start, and you know to go far enough right, maybe you can find: Margaret Thatcher. It sits in that liminal zone between legitimate and not legitimate trail. There’s no sign at the start telling you not to ride it, but that’s mostly because not many people know the trail’s there. So I’m not telling.

It could be in Innerleithen though.

After a slightly out of character start through rocks and moorland, Maggie plumets through coniferous forest. The trail constantly evolves as parts get too worn out so new lines appear through the fresh loam and, of course, fresh roots. It gets steep too, silly steep in places, yet somehow the dirt is just good enough and the corners just rutted enough that you can slip and slide and bounce your way down and jjuuuussssstt get away with it. And if you don’t the undergrowth is pretty forgiving. Talking of corners, unlike the Iron Lady, this trail IS for turning. There’s not many points where you go in a straight line for more than a few meters.

Chez Danny. There’re two very similar trails out on riders left of the bikepark, Chaz Danny and Nuthouse. I’m not sure which is better really. They both share the same excellent traverse over the alpages away from the park trails which sees you hopping and skipping through the grass like a Von Trapp. Nuthouse does have a better top to bottom flow, Chaz Danny kinda abruptly ends about 2/3rds of the way down the hill. But then, Nuthouse needs a bit of a pedal to get into it whilst Chez Danny is fully up to speed just a few meters in. I’ll go with Chez Danny because I really like corners, and Chez Danny is all about the corners. There’s a bit of straight to start with, and a few more on the lower section, but otherwise you’re either setting up for a corner, executing a corner, or exiting a corner for many hundreds of meters of vertical. A good thing. Unless it’s wet in which case there is no traction worth talking about and you can remove the ‘set up’ and ‘exit’ parts of the above description and replace it with ‘sideways’ after executing a corner.

Wouaiy. Which is the noise you make quite a lot of the time on the way down. Bike Park isn’t the greatest thing about Verbier, but that doesn’t mean there’s not some great bike park. Best started from Fontanet on the Rodze trail where you can get your eye in on the upper jumps framed by, if you’ve been lucky with the weather, one of the better backdrops of any park in the world. In an unusual twist for a European bike park, the jumps are all of a fairly similar size too, so if you get the first few, you should get the rest. Ish. It’s not Canada ey.

Over the whoops (what exactly are you meant to do with whoops? I really don’t get them) and through the wooden arch into Woohai proper (you could also get here straight from Ruinettes, but where’s the fun in that?) At first it’s a lot of tight left, right, left, right, left, repeat corners, with the odd wee gap jump thrown in for measure. As it’s a bike park you don’t feel quite so bad about throwing some shapes to get round the corners, but I’m not sure I’d say that if I worked on the park maintenance team.

As the angle of the terrain slackens off so can your braking fingers and you enter the best section. Fast, diving around the trees. Big well built berms throw you round the corners and little lips dotted around the trail let you gap over almost everything you could want to, making a root infested trail feel as smooth as tarmac when you get it right.

In Verbier it never stays mellow for long though, soon enough you’re hanging off the back of the bike and chucking it round the turns again. And then you’re dumped out onto fire road faced with a choice. Step up and drop into the black final section of obligatory gap drops and tech rocks. Fun, but not for those of a nervous disposition, or. Down the fire road for a bit to the excellent last red section; deep berms, with the end of the last overlapping the start of the next, just as it should be really, to let you proper pop from corner to corner. One of those trails that massages your ego and fools you into thinking you’re a far better rider than you are. Which means it’s time to get back on the lift, leave the park, and go ride….

Vertigo. Which isn’t that grand a name for the trail as it’s not really that exposed and Hitchcock hasn’t appeared for his cameo on the trail. Or not yet anyways. The name is immaterial. The pedal round from the bike park round La Chaux with the grand views of the Grand Combin in front of you nicely whets the appetite. The appetizer of the techy traverse from the gravel road to the start of the trail does just that. By the time you start to roll in over the undulating alpage you are definitely ready for the main course.

A shame then that the first bite is a little soured by the stravafication of the initial turns. Or lack of turns due to the straight lining trench that runs through them. No matter, the bike park crew are apparently going to return this to its former glory soon, and you’re into the woods and all manner of trail taste sensation before you know it anyways.

Vertigo eases you in gently, the trail swoops and flows through the forest for the first half, occasional flashes of the drop appear through the trees but mostly you’d never know how ridiculous a bit of hillside it is for a trail to pass through. Slowly but surely though, the swooping turns tighten up. Soon your arms start to burn from the braking into each cresta run esque hairpin and you’re wishing you’d paid more attention at cornering school.

Then, the section that gives the trail it’s name. You emerge from the woods into some straightforward trail. Gently curving, not too steep. And about 30cm wide, bench cut into the side of a steep slope that ends in a plunge to the gully below. It’s only short, you’re soon back into throwing the bike around corners then the final long deathgrip-if-you-dare straight and the Dirt magazine (R.I.P.) gap jump at the end. My favourite trail off the lifts, I think, Donkey Derby is up there too right enough. Either way, what next, Lama Farm or Comfort Zone?

Basically, there’s a lot of good trails. Some are better than others, some are more tech than others. You’re not going to know for yourself unless you go and try them though. Think of this post as a bit of gentle encouragement to go and make the journey over the border from Chamonix. The lifts are open until 28th October** if that’s the extra push you need.

A big thanks to Bike Verbier who have not only shown me all these trails, but pay me to show other people them too. And, more importantly, loads of harder to find and access trails that you’d have nae chance of getting done otherwise.

*Or a scenic but pricy train ride apart. Or a sweaty road bike. Or an interesting MTB trip.
** Weather permitting…. I’ve been skiing up at Lac des Vaux in October before!

22/10/2018
Verbier. Open for business

Miss us?

Winter has been. Maybe not quite gone, but certainly been. Spring is here with her promises of skiing in the morning and biking in the afternoon. Of course it rarely works quite that perfectly, but it’s still been good to get either a good ski and a short ride, or a short ski and a good ride in. Tuesday was the latter, a short ski in the morning followed by loading up the car with Spencer and Nina for the first road trip of the year. To……………

Verbier. But then you probably guessed that, what with the blog title including ‘Verbier’ and all.

But before that, what of the Chamonix valley? Well, the below average snow year has meant the valley trails have melted out a good bit earlier than usual, so from mid March the Coupeau and Merlet trails have been rideable with only small patches of snow to contend with (well, the cone of avalanche debris at the start of the Merlet trail is a bit more than a small patch, but it’s not hard to pass). Even away from the south facing trails, the routes down from Lavancher can now be ridden cleanly and Servoz is riding well, if muddily, with only a few downed trees to duck under.

Back to Verbier then, where after 11 in the morning you can now ride the 700m vert from Le Chable to Verbier with your bike. Though only once you’ve found the bike caddy for the gondolas, put it on the bubble yourself, been told off for putting it on the wrong way, on the wrong gondola, then finally put your bike on it. Not the finest of customer service, but repeated with admirable Swiss consistency on each lap.

Once up you have a couple of official options open to you, all marked on the handy pdf you can download from the Verbier website here. If the lifties aren’t too cheery, at least the bike park crew are doing their best to encourage riding. You’ll notice that there’s not a huge number of tracks on the official piste card, we also checked out the full summer card here which has more, and took a map, with yet more again.

If you’ve ridden Verbier before then you’ll know what to expect from the lower trails, indeed you’ve probably ridden most of them as part of the bigger descents from Ruinettes. If not, then to riders left of the gondola line they’re much like Chamonix but with a different back drop and a few more corners, and to the right they’re more open and fast with bermed corners and old part cobbled roads.

The best two trails of the day were probably the marked red and black “enduro” trail on the map, and the well ridden Patier descent (both of these will no doubt have local names like “nuthouse” or “jackass” or something, but I don’t know what they are. Bof)

The first is a short ride through town then follow signs for ‘Medieres’ down road and firetrack before turning left at a utilities building and riding along some more undulating fireroad for a couple of km to ‘Le Mayentset’ where the trail drops abruptly off and continues down with interest a fair way until a junction gives you the choice of left for some fast flow that’s too short lived and a nice cruise down farm tracks to the lift or up right for some exposed tech followed by very very fast straights. And a nice cruise down farm tracks to the lift.

The second seems to be the trail of choice for the folk on DH bikes that were coming out at about 5pm, probably because there’s not really any uphill involved. Head through town to Perin (the end of the #3 bus line as a local telt us whilst only slightly lost on one of my “we should try this trail, I think it’ll be fine…..” laps) where just as you leave the village you turn left off the road before a crash barrier and continue down with, again, interest. Much faster than the other trails and more heavily ridden too. The use seems to have built up reasonable berms on many of the corners, great for getting the hips working and trying to remember correct technique at the start of season.

There’s lots of other trails to go at, take a map along and explore, the pictures are here to encourage that, but those 2 were the pick of the day.

A major bonus for the Chamonix season pass holders, Spence and me, was that the lifts are included in your annual pass, making the trip to expensive old Switzerland a bargain. At least, it was a bargain until we got back from the last lap to discover some kind soul had panned in my rear window. A double whammy as it made fitting the boot mounted cycle rack for the drive home somewhat more complicated….

08/04/2015