Monthly Archives: June 2014

The longest day

1km vertical of singletrack

Summer solstice. The longest day, shortest night and start of the countdown to winter. Also an excuse (if an excuse was ever needed) to both go in to the hills to do stuff and go out on the town.

After some warm up laps around Les Houches (trails all riding nice, bit of rain would be good to give some more grip though) we headed up the Bellevue gondola and climbed round towards the Col du Mont Lachet.

The trail down from the col is fairly exposed in places, but I think it’s pretty fun. Not everyone else, or possibly … [Read full post]

Bikes on a train, and other forms of mechanical uplift.

Today I am mostly liking green

Lifts are open, no more pretending that pedalling uphill is worthy and good.

An opening party was being held at Le Tour with demo bikes, drinks and rumours of new trails, so we headed in the opposite direction to Les Houches.

It seemed a fairly popular choice and it was surprising to see just how much the main DH track wore in over the course of the day.

Not having big bikes in addition to our normal bikes with their mere 160mm of travel, slack angles and huge brakes, Lorne & I rode a few laps of the Prarion front … [Read full post]

Seven days and counting

Singletrack, boulders, sunshine. All good.

Summer’s here. Skies are blue, temps are high, taps aff etc.

Eager to enjoy the weather before it turns (another side effect of being Scottish, you can never, never learn to trust the weather to stay good) Spence and I headed out for an easy(ish…) day to check out a new trail and see where the snow level had got to.

I try to avoid the lift accessed trails when the lifts aren’t running (seven days till they open) in favour of more esoteric trails so I’ve spent a lot of the last month riding above Servoz. Today was no … [Read full post]

Average.

Above average to start with.

Average sounds, well, average. Not good, not bad, but not anything memorable. Mediocre even. With hundreds of kilometres of the world’s best trails on the doorstep the ‘average’ bar sits pretty high around Chamonix.

Searching as ever for good, or at least above average, trails we headed out of town and round the corner to Les Contamines. It’s only 15km away in a straight line, but about 30 minutes in a car on account of there being some 4000m high lumps of rock and ice in the way.

The same lumps of rock and ice made a great back drop … [Read full post]