Category: Chamonix ride

Forgive me if my memory is a little hazy, I’m casting my mind back 20 odd years here, but I think the first bike magazine I bought was some long bust title called MTBtrail or MTB rider or such. I forget exactly, but the title’s not important.

The contents included an article on converting your bike from 3×6 to 3×7 (and whether you needed 7 gears at the back and perhaps that it might cause the bike to be too fragile and anyway you certainly don’t need 8 gears, that would be crazy). There were some words on rides you could do around the country, tests of bikes worth crazy money (I think there was a Rocky Mountain that cost almost £900!) and some race reports. A lot of race reports actually, this was before the internet mind.

The second magazine I bought was MBuk. Then the local bike shop would sell 1 month old issues of Mountain Biker for cheap so I’d get that, then MTBpro, because being elitist is a good thing. Then Dirt came onto the scene and I bought that for ages too.

With such a back catalogue of magazines you couldn’t help but notice a certain repetition in them all. After a couple of years everything useful had kinda been said and the copy was mostly rehashed old articles for new readers in the hope the long term ones had had too many concussions to notice. Sure there was the odd insightful interview, amazing destination article or genuinely innovative bit of gear reviewed but mostly……meh. I stopped buying bike magazines.

That’s where we’re at here. I’ve not ridden every trail around Chamonix, but there’s not much left and they tend to be a wee bit trickier to get to. I’ve not written about every trail ridden either, some things need to be found by your own hard work. Instead I’m having to find new ways to write about old tracks. This is made harder by:

1) An easily searchable archive, at least with magazines you had to remember if you’d kept the back issue you were thinking of, and;

2) That we tend to ride trails in a pretty seasonal order. You don’t see us pushing 1500m up under a lift that’ll be running 4 weeks later, and every November we’re riding in much the same place.

So just like this time last year, and the year before, and etc., we’re riding about Servoz where you dodge the snow line a bit longer and get just that wee bit more sun than the valley. It’s lots of fun, you should try it. The pedal up’s pretty quick and you can fit a fair number of laps into an afternoon. Bring a spade and give the trails a wee hand too if you’re bored.

Next, more of the same.

10 minutes from the front door is one of the only bike friendly uplifts running in the alps and from the top of the Brevent gondola an embarrassingly large number of trails work their way down the sunny side of the Chamonix valley.

So obviously we dingied that and went and pedalled up a hill for 1200 meters.

Last summer I injured my thumb and couldn’t ride. Instead I had to run about trails with a branch in my hands making bike noises. One of the trails I found looked like it would make a grand wee ride, if a fair bit of effort to get to, but you canny really tell until you try with real wheels instead of a branch.

For some reason folk seem to be more reluctant to join me on rides to unknown trails these days but Wayne’s got an unrivalled wealth of experience in carrying bikes up hill just to carry them back down again around Chamonix, and Sandy prefers winter climbing to sport limestone so is actually happier if the ride is brutal and everyone is miserable.

I digress. We pedalled and pushed and pushed and pedalled from Servoz to the Refuge Moede Anternne where we then sat in the sun and ate sandwiches.

Last time I was here was in the spring with Spencer and the snow forced us to change our plans. The first autumn snow fell about a week ago and some of it was looking like it was here for the long haul. Fortunately it wasn’t too deep and we were able to keep going along the Promenaz plateau towards the collection of lakes.

Trail quality > views for me 99% of the time, but the backdrop through this bit of the world is pretty hard to beat. Dolomite esque towers behind, the biggest hills in the alps in front and purty wee lochans to your side.

There’s an awkward section leaving the Lac de Pormenaz when your running, but with bikes the rocky scramble nicely topped in refrozen compacted snow is decidedly tricky. We were all glad of the insitu ropes to help haul us up, feet spinning on the ice like they were still turning the pedals.

Once back onto the plateau you get some great riding along the thin bands of singletrack winding over the heather, grass and bedrock. You don’t get much of this around Chamonix, mostly you’re either going up (preferably courtesy of Compagnie du Mont Blanc) or down. Instead here it’s technical traversing, Tech-C perhaps? Everything needs a hashtagable name now.

The other great thing about this style of riding is it’s much easier to stop and grab some photos without disturbing the flow of the ride. Which is why you don’t get many photos of the descent from today, far too much flow to break the ride too often.

We stopped at the Chalets de Pormenaz to grab some water from the fountain and change mindset from mild mannered trail riding to SUPER GNAR DH. Or something. The chalets are pretty perfectly located to both be a marker you can see from where ever you ended up on the plateau (there’s a lot of trails, the chances of picking the right one are slim) and of the change in nature of the riding.

From here it’s downhill, initially rocky and loose and more like the Alpes Maritimes above the Med’, but with some big drops to your side reminding you that it’s Chamonix. Despite the size of the drops as you start the trail the exposure is never too bad and there’s far more intimidating riding around here.

As you got lower the rocks got smaller and less loose, then the trees thicker and the ground more dirt than stone. Then more rooty and so on until you eventually end up on a fireroad having covered most sort of trail in the last 1000m.

The fireroad isn’t the end of the fun though, a detour towards the Buvette de la Fontaine yields another section of forest, this time ticking the loam box before a km of fast fireroad brings you to an even faster trail and final flurry through the suburbs of Servoz to the carpark.

A trail worth going back to for sure, but I’ll stick to milking the last of the uplift for the next few days I think.