Chamonix Bike Blog

Author: chamonixbikeblog

Une Tranche de Tarte Française*

Seen A Slice of British Pie yet?

Grand, innit. I’m not completely sure if it’s a good thing or not that the best bit of bike filming I’ve seen in years is so good because it’s emulating edits (or “videos” as we used to call them, what with them generally being actual physical things rather than just interweb) from 15+ years ago, but that’s not really important. It’s mostly grand because it’s a tour of the Uk’s regional accents with some pissing about in the mud thrown in for good measure.

And everyone(ish, probably, maybe, I don’t know) on the internet loves it, so it will dictate MTB fashion for the next year or so at least. Hence, ever keen to get in at the start of the curve, a trip to the French alps version of a muddy British forest. La Saleve.

The carpark was filled with folks 2016 toys. New bikes, new parts, new clothes. Some folk were even getting their new pro-model clothes with their name on it…. Lots of shiny clean stuff ready to get covered in the perma-damp clay of La Saleve, though it turned out not to be too muddy and the waterproofs of the first lap were quickly ditched.

Every time I go to La Saleve I ride some trails I never new existed and Saturday was no different.Helped no end by being with folk who actually knew where they were going.

Whilst following someone with a rough idea of where the trail goes does help with navigation, some of them thar French riders are kinda fast on slippy, steep, technical trails so you could quickly find yourself going sideways into trouble. Just as I was thinking even Bruni would be struggling to keep pace with me I nailed a perfect 2 wheel drift into tree headbutt.

New helmet tested, no damage done.

Alas not everyone was so lucky with crashes, Mati picked a fight with a tree stump and managed to do something fairly unpleasant to his shoulder. After missing most of last summer with a broken collarbone he was pretty gutted but strapped himself together with an innertube and got on with getting off the hill whilst Ben went to find a van and the rest of us cruised back to the carpark and sort the gear.

A shitty end to a great day playing about on bikes. And continuing that theme, as an anticlimactic end to the post, here’s some information. The 10 ride pass is now 46.30euro, you canny swap it between people anymore, but you can take a photo of the QR code and show the lifty your phone instead. It’s like the open university this blog. Informative AND fun.

*Just to make everyone absolutely clear, the title in no way implies any relationship between the bike handling skillz in the film and us lot up La Saleve, it’s just a lazy link into something interesting happening now and saves me having to think too much to get the posts up and running.

17/04/2016
A jaded hack rides again

***Edited on 30th May with the updated opening and closing dates for summer 2016. Two weekends to go y’all…**

I did some reading over the winter on how to betterer use english good for right stuff.

“Start with an analogy or an image” is one common recommendation for getting over the awkward hurdle of sullying the blank sheet of white paper (pixels) infront of you.

Rising, like a phoenix from the ashes, the bike emerges from its winter slumber. Sounds a bit too heroic a comparison for me digging the bike out the back of the cave, shaking the dust off it (or the worst of it at least), pumping up the tyres and heading out for a wee pootle about the grand trails low in the Chamonix valley.

In fact, it’s all so mundane that I’ll skip the riding bit and move straight to that rarest of things; a useful blog post.

The where-can-I-cheat-gravity-and-get-myself-carried-to-the-top-of-the-hill-and-when-does-it-start list, complete with a new 2016 innovation, when does it finish. Elon Musk ain’t got shit on me.

Chamonix (usual CdMB caveats apply)

Bellevue: 11th June – 25th September
Le Tour: 11th June – 25th September
Flegere: 11th June – 18th September
Brevent/Planpraz: 11th June – 18th September
Tramway du Mont Blanc: 11th June – 18th September
Prarion: 18th June – 11th September
Grand Montets: 25th June – 25th September
Vallorcine: 2nd July – 4th September

And some other handy places

La Thuile: 25th June – 4th September
Portes du Mont-Blanc: 24th June – 4th September (and part of the MBU pass now too mind)
Grand Massif: Assorted start and finish times across the area, but basically between 2nd July – 28th August
Pila: Weekend 18th/19th June for the Gondola then full opening 25th June – 11th September
Portes du Soleil: Full area opening 24th June – 4th September with limited openings from 11th June and Les Gets weekends only 28/29 May & 4/5 June
Verbier: All weekends in June then 27th June – 30th October

The paradigm shifting change that is including closing dates into my early season lift opening dates post isn’t the end of the innovation here at Chamonix bike blog, oh no.

Sometime in May(ish) an instagram link thingy will appear over there to your right in the side bar where more regular updates on trail conditions will appear and also you can ask questions that might get answered in the same month as they’re asked because, to be honest, I really don’t check the email or facebook inboxes that often and when I do I tend to just delete 1/2 the messages anyway.

It’s not just me that’s been changing stuff either. CdMB has extended the summer pass to include the whole Portes du Mont Blanc area, so you can now ride from pretty much Switzerland at Vallorcine all the way through the Chamonix valley and over to St Gervais, Les Contamines, Megeve and Combleux with barely an uphill pedal stroke along the way. And back again. Maybe. We’ll test this one out in a couple months.

12/04/2016
An interlude.

It’s December. The day of the longest night to be exact. Eleven days before the end of the year, and we’re riding our bikes.

As a lefty-liberal-pinko-socialist who will talk at you for hours on why capitalism will fail as it doesn’t obey the 1st or 2nd laws of thermodynamics, it’d be expected of me to launch into a rant about global warming and how it’s all our fault here.

But it’s christmas, you’re saved, I’ll be nice and no bother. Anyways, December is often a poor month for snow, often warm, often dry. Mibbies not so often good for biking, I guess this years that’s the silver lining on the cloud. Not that there’s been many clouds.

Still, I’d rather be skiing.

Tree skiing deep fresh snow in the cold of mid-winter is where it’s at for me and right now it’s not looking like a great winter for it. Instead of complaining though, we should be celebrating. This is the 2nd “bad” Christmas in a row. Another couple of these and the ski holiday trade will be scuppered, leaving a handful of operating lifts and hardly anyone able to make a living in the alps. The snow will truly be be ours for the taking, once them pesky locals who’ve grown up here and need us monchus, seasonaires and ski bums to work in their businesses and live in their apartments have had to leave town.

Not quite sure what we’ll do to keep food on the table, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

In the absence of good skiing, we’ve been going for some good biking.

On the sunny side of the valley it’s autumn. Hell, on the north facing side it’s pretty much autumn! Either way, as long as you’re not in the shade and below 1600m then you’re safe from ice and snow. By the time you get to Servoz the conditions are perfect.

Dry empty trails, not too warm for the pedal up but not too cold for the ride down. The only complaint would be that the bronze carpet of fallen leaves might look picturesque, but it’s a bugger for knowing where the trail’s going or what might be underneath said foot-deep carpet. It’s about as close as we’re getting to riding pow for the now though.

If that’s not enough for you, Les Gets is putting the bike hooks back on the Mont Cherie lift for this Saturday.

Still not enough? Verbier are giving free guided #enduro rides on the lower section of the Le Chable-Verbier gondola this week.

STILL not enough? Pila are already letting bikes onto the lower gondola. Get your days right and you can ride 3 countries in 3 days…..

Looking into the crystal balls of ECM, GFS & assorted websites I’m going to forecast that there’ll be more riding of bikes had in the next few weeks, but 2016’s a whole new year so let’s see if the predicted wetter & warmer than average plays out.

So, there might be some more posts here this winter, or there might not. I’ll hazard a guess at the next post being 12th March 2016, but don’t hold me to it. Either ways, happy non-denominational winter capitalist fest (hey, I had to get my left wing killjoyism out somewhere) and check out Lorne’s ski blog if you want to see much of the same but on 2 planks not 2 wheels.

21/12/2015
Cunning as a fox drunk on cunning juice

Ahh, the clear mountain air, the efficient clean travel on a bike, the pristine alpine environment.

Shame we drove here.

Worse, the ride’s plan involved knocking the vertical climbed down from 1500m to 450m by driving over in 2 cars, leaving 1 at the bottom then heading back to the top. More wasted miles, more wasted time, more wasted CO2.

But, in the future, it will be different…….

Electric cars are getting closer and closer (it’s a long read, but way more worth while more than the rest of this) and renewables are forming more and more of the grid capacity (Scotland managed 50% of power generation through renewables in 2014) so there’ll be less to feel guilty about there, but it’s still irritatingly inefficient to drive 2 cars.

Which is why I predict the next big thing in mountainbiking will be the google self drive car.

Yup, think about it. Sit there and let it drive you to the top of the hill, get the bike out, then plug in the GPS of the bottom of the hill and ghost the car off. Shred the gnar to the power of X-TRM then get back in to the motor and repeat.

Unfortunately, that’s the future and this is the now, so I needed a cunning plan to avoid the inefficiencies, a plan cunning as a fox drunk on cunning juice. I needed…..

An ultra runner.

As luck would have it, Colin had got into town the day before and wanted to run up some hills, the game was on.

It doesn’t take much of a glance at a map to notice the trail traversing from Col du Forclaz below the Pont Rond before dropping down the ridgeline towards Borgeaud near Martigny, with the perma-autumn showing no sign of letting up today seemed a good day to try it out.

The traverse round goes easily enough, a mix of pedalling, pushing and dancing as we discovered several tricky patches of well frozen snow below the coating of pine needles…

From Portalo (no, really) the trail pops out of the trees and into view, along with the Grand Combin comes a thin line of a trail heading off into the distance.

I’ll be honest, for the first 300m or so of vertical the descent it was only ok. Fast and open track ranging from about one to four or so foot wide. Never particularly technical except for the challenge of keeping the bike straight on the loose surface at the speeds you could reach. So far, a really good choice for less confident riders still looking for a big alpine descent.

Fortunately, as well as driving the car to the base of the hill for us, Colin had been scouting the track and gave us the heads up for a easy to miss trail ducking left off the main trail about 1/2 height.

Just as well he told us, it’s pretty easy to miss but well worth taking. Could do with a wee bit more traffic to clear some of the twigs and crap off the trail, but otherwise, smashing bit of riding. Obviously there are no photos of this bit due to the combined issues of the trail being too much fun to want to stop (common issue this) and it’s dark in the woods, we’re no riding with a flash set up.

As ever, even with the balance of down to up being tipped far in our favour, the descent ended quicker that the climb (mibbies there’s something to be said for trail running there) and some eyewateringly fast 4×4 trail topped by some fun but loose singletrack spat us out in Borgeaud and the conveniently parked car.

Conclusion? Great idea, good trail, hopefully to be repeated.

Course, we could always just get e-mountainbikes and solve the problem that way. Or maybe not, just stick to convincing folk to drive the car down for us. Cheers Colin

18/11/2015
Techy treat

You into religion much?

I’m not sure why I put in the question mark, I don’t care in the slightest and it’s not relevant.

What does matter is that the French like a bit of Catholicism and just can’t get enough of their saints. Hence, all saints day is ‘something’ here, and we get a holiday.

Presumably we should be celebrating all those lucky souls who’ve made it to heaven, and all those the next day who’re stuck in purgatory. Instead we put on fancy dress* (c’mon, tell me bikers aren’t going to look back at what we’re wearing in 20 years and say ‘hmm, those colours don’t really work do they’) and go ride.

Compagnie du Mont Blanc get in on the act too and re-open the Brevent lifts for a couple weeks, so whilst the rest of the Alps moan about pedalling up hills, we sit in a gondola for 950m vertical, or 1450m if the snow level’s high enough.

Moving away from folks personal beliefs that guide their lifestyle choices and back to something important. Brevent trails. I’ve written about them all here before and about 2 years ago decided to stop putting up posts on ground I’ve covered already but that’s made regular posts increasingly tricky, I’ll re-hash some old ground.

Actually, I can hit some new ground. Just when you think you kent all the trails off a lift, I rode a new trail earlier this year and bookmarked it for return come the autumn. The Bellachat trail. You can get into it two ways, either from the top of the hill, head for the Aiguillet des Houches but before the climb drop down past the refuge and prepare for switch back after switch back of steep tech and rock.

Alternatively enjoy (or don’t) the trails down the Brevent couloir, take the climb for Sentier des Guards then at the next junction, take the right, traverse for a while then you’re into more fast and flowing trails.

Ach, who am I kidding. This post is here because aye, we’re riding trails that have been getting ridden for years, but the weather is spectacular, the autumn colours are spectacular and the trails are spectacular. And we took lots of photos and want to show them off.

All these photos are from the first four days of November. Four days, thousands of meters of descent and way too much fun.

It’s not trail park blue run riding, but the riding from Brevent is some of the best anywhere. I don’t care where you’ve ridden, if you don’t find a trail up there you rate, you’re not good enough on a bike.

Elitist and proud.

Depending on how much up and traversing you fancy, you can start at Brevent and finish anywhere between Servoz and Tre le Champ. We stuck between the Chalets de Chailloux and Les Tines, plenty of time for pedalling come next week.

Or at least, you can do the above if you’re quick. The lifts close on Friday 6th (why Friday? Good question, welcome to the weird and wonderful world of CdMB) so get it whilst it’s hot.

*Shakespeare called this day ‘hallowmas’. Why, why, why did that not take off? And it’s guising, not trick or treat.

05/11/2015