Chamonix Bike Blog

Category: Road trip

Sospel. Good Content.

Every winter the blog, like the bike, gets put in the cave and forgotten about for a few months.

There’s skiing to be done. Who’d go biking in the snow after all. OK, fatbikers, but they’re diff’rent to us, so should be shunned. You’re allowed to blame other people for your problems again, it’s fine.

But this year, after my wee 8 month break from bikes last season, was going to be different. I was going to keep biking through the warm dry alpine winter like all my friends did in 2017. Key to this was a trip down to the 06 for Tim, Ross and me to ride Provence’s finest trails in the winter sun. Enjoying dust and t-shirts whilst Chamonix shivered.

Well, that was the plan anyways.

Lets go back to the Provence bit.

The 06, Maritime Alpes, Provence, whitevers, can lay a good claim to being the most influential location in European mountain biking and hence the world because, let’s be honest, when did the US ever lead an “extreme sport trend”? The first ever world cup DH was held just down the road from Sospel in Cap d’Ail, and was won by some 17 year old local lad.

Most of the big French names in biking are from this way, and you have to admit racers don’t get much more influential than Voullioz or Barel. Then there’s the Trans-Provence. Ash Smith’s multi day enduro stage race that spawned a hundred imitators and made enduro cool before enduro stopped being cool but managed to stay cool.

So, bearing all that in mind, you might want to know E-Bikes are big in Provence just now.

Whether you like garlic bread or not, it’s the future. I’ve seen it.

Hence, when you get an invite to ride in Provence from Ash, you go. And it was his birthday too so doubly rude not to.

I’d say I endured two days of social media bullying from the rest of the crew who’d already headed down from Chamonix, but to be honest I was either working or sleeping in the days leading up so missed the fun of “where is @chamonixbikeblog?” Meeting in Sospel’s PMU bar to begin a celebratory night of beer, rose wine and aperol spritzers brought me up to speed.

Sunday dawned.

Saturday night meant it wasn’t exactly bright and early, but 5 of us managed to drink enough coffee to stand around offering helpful advice to Tim as he failed to fix his rear tyre and only an hour or so behind schedule we rolled out of Ride Sospel HQ for a day on the trails.

Ash has very egalitarianly put pure hunners of the trails together on GPX files so you too can have the experience we enjoyed. We did have Ash, Bry and Joris taking turns shuttling and showing us around, so I’m no really sure what trails we rode, but they were right good!

Less good was the weather. Lunch was spent hiding from the rain in the pub, but stoke remained high enough to head up towards the Cime du Bosc. Heading higher meant a change in weather, going from fine rain, through smurr, into a bit of drizzle, then sleet. Finally snow. Which set a bit of an ongoing pattern.

No matter, the Transit had snow tyres and we had extra layers. Ross had heated socks. Having a kit bag ready for expedition to Baffin has it’s advantages I guess.

Do you ever arrive somewhere and it just feels “right”?

The bluff overlooking the Roya valley is one of those places. I admit, the bullet pocked ruins of a house and a miserable looking bunker from the infamous Maginot Line (ok, the Alpine Line war pedants) would suggest that at points in the past for several people here was very much not a right place, but today on a selection of shiny #enduro rigs (we were all wearing half face helmets and goggles, WITHOUT IRONY. So Damn Enduro. bro) this place felt right.

The first turn, a right hander hairpin that drops steeply away into a wall of death esque wooden berm, looked a giggle in the dry but in snow more suggested death by splinters. Fortunately that was the end of the woodwork (mostly) and from here down was 3 laps of variation on the theme of fast, floaty airs, flow, fun.

A pretty good ride out for the first full day on the bike of the year!

If Sunday night was a more subdued affair (most of us are now firmly in the masters category at the races) then Monday morning was also quieter than the previous morning. That quiet you only get when there’s something dampening the normal noises of a village.

The quiet you get when it snows.

Chamonix is no stranger to snow, right now the Meteo France bulletin de neige informs us the north facing slopes have 170cm of snow at 1500m, 280cm at 2000m and 370cm at 2500m altitude (Aye, we are a bit worried what this means for bike season). But Sospel IS a stranger to snow.

It never snows there.

Never.

Still, we were here to bike and after various vehicles had been stashed in assorted locations around the region for Plan A riding, and a bit more coffee, we got in the van for some biking.

This is where the plan started to fail.

When Facebook started its live feed malarkey they probably didn’t envisage Tim’s attempts to conduct interviews whilst Ash negotiated a stage of the Monte Carlo rallye in a Ford Transit with a good £30k worth of bike in and on it, but who can know what their creation can go on to be….certainly not facebookski.

I’m not sure the live feed of us putting snowsocks on was quite as popular. Either way, sometime later it was accepted we probably weren’t going to reach the trail head and another plan was needed.

This plan was the Foret de Menton. Otherwise known as stage 23 in the Trans Provence. Traditionally one of the last stages of the race, our first stage of the day.

There’s something brilliantly stupid about riding bikes in proper snow. This was none of your usual couple of cm of wet slush that biking in the snow generally involves. Talk of why we’d left the ski kit in Chamonix wasn’t completely done in jest.

Keep moving with a bit of speed, pick trails that aren’t too steep but still have a bit of gradient and hope there aren’t too many roots under the snow is the usual advice for riding in the neige. I’d generally add use the previous riders tracks as clues but it was now snowing so hard that our tracks were covered between laps.

This is all good and fun, but bike kit isn’t ski kit and before too long stoke alone isn’t quite enough to keep you warm. Grand plans of riding the final stage of the T.P. down to Menton were abandoned in favour of another bit of rally driving to a heated room serving food and drink by the beach.

Where it was still snowy.

Seriously, when does it ever snow on the beach in the Med?

Time to head back north, on increasingly snow free roads, to the frigid hills of Chamonix where it wasn’t snowing but was cold enough to make me fear for my toes again.

Another trip will be made down to Sospel to try the trails under more usual conditions, you should try it too.

Ride Sospel can sort you out with accommodation and trails, Cool Bus can sort you out with shuttles and if you invite us Chamonix folk down it would seem we can sort you out with unseasonal weather.

Cheers Bry and Joris for sharing their trails, shuttles, beers and chat and a massive thanks to Ash and his family for welcoming us down to their house.

Bonjour, ça va. Good content that.

06/03/2018
Aosta, Col Entrelor

Climbing, skiing or biking, Aosta Valley has got some of the best lines you’ve ever or never heard of.

Year round good weather, stunning backdrops of some of the biggest and best hills in the alps, coffee, pizza. There ain’t much it hasn’t got. During three weeks in Canada I would be looking at friend’s instagram feeds full of rides in Aosta and suffering serious #fomo. This tell us that 1) society (or mostly me) has an issue with living in the here and now, and 2) Aosta is really that good.

So, after getting back to Chamonix I was pretty happy when one of the first messages I got was from Ross suggesting a trip through the Mont-Blanc tunnel to go ride in Aosta.

The first contrast with B.C. was as we loaded four bikes and riders onto and into a European spec estate car. This procedure is considerably easier with a pick up truck, however I consoled myself with the knowledge that said truck would use more fuel backing out of the driveway than we would for the 100km round trip, even with detours for coffee.

Bad omens continued as we had to dingie our first choice of cafe as the Carabinieri were parked outside, which was where we planned to park so we could keep an eye on the bikes strapped to the car. Second choice was closed for the day. Fortunately next door was serving and 1.10 cappuccinos could start pointing the day in the right direction.

If I’d been paying more attention I’d have followed Davide’s lead in getting a croissant and espresso chaser, but I wasn’t paying attention and so had no idea just how high Ross was planning on making us ride.

From the carpark in Degioz, Valsavarenche, there weren’t any more clues either, as Ross pointed to a series of switchbacks on a 4×4 track leading up a hill before adding “then it goes up to a col over there”, and we set off up the trail.

Ross soon pulled into the lead, unsurprising really given that despite being a life sentence skibum he is fit to the point of owning a road bike. A road bike that he’s taken for casual laps of Mont Blanc. In a day. He’s also smashed his back up to the point where he can’t really walk, or stand, or sit, so his only option was to keep pedaling until he fell off or reached the top.

We’ll never know which it was, as Dave, Davide and me set a more relaxed pace up the hill because it’s Italy. You either do it at a steady relaxed pace, flat out, or not at all.

As we pulled above the tree line and the full views of Gran Paridiso and the remains of its glaciers came into view we met a signpost which finally let me know where we were going, the Col Entrelor at 3002m altitude.

3002m is pretty high. Maybe not for climbers, maybe not during ski season, but for a biker attached to mechanical uplift who’d not been above 2500m for 6 months, getting to 3 kilometers above sea level was going to be quite painful. At least I had company.

The climb continues through alpages, past barns and refuges and small lakes, over the occasional bit of frost and disturbing assorted herds of Ibex and chamois. Another advantage of Aosta over B.C. there, the wildlife is lower down the food chain than mountain bikers.

After continuing for quite some time, the climb stopped and the col arrived, complete with views down into Val de Rhemes and beyond. We could now turn round and come straight back the way we came. Futile fun.

Normally I’m no a fan of there-and-back rides as I’d rather not see what’s coming up on the trail, ruins the surprise. This time however the combination of altitude, sun and overall height climbed meant I’d completely forgotten everything before dropping in, so the whole descent was an unknown present to open.

And what a treat it was too. Other than a couple of one meter sections where the trail narrowed between rocks and fear of ripping off a derailleur or brake disk encouraged the prudent use of a foot to guide the bike through, the full descent back to the tree line was fast and flowing singletrack with just enough wee drops and rolls to keep you on your toes.

We had feared that the quality of the trail was going to drop as we re-joined the 4×4 track that had given us the first 650m of ascent but no, a right turn onto the trail down to Eau Rousse saw to that.

You’d think all bench cut alpine trails through the trees would be the same. They follow a fairly similar gradient as they traverse slopes too steep to walk up (or ride down) directly, feature 180 degree bends every so often, and generally have roots cutting across them at right angles to travel. Yet, all over the alps, some are just a bit better than others.

This trail was better even than those. A well built bike park line lets riders of different speeds and abilities to play with the terrain and find airs and gaps and features to play with. This trail did the same, despite being made long long before anyone considered it might be used as anything other than away of getting from A to B. Makes you wonder how many other lost trails out there could be resurrected to do the same…

No matter how good a trail, it always ends. Probably for the best, I suspect on the third or fourth day of continuous descent it might get a bit samey and you’d want to stop for a coffee break.

The trail ended, we span the short distance back down the road, loaded the car and began a new quest for pizza. No doubt some other bikers in some other place were having a better day on a better trail, but I really didn’t feel like I was missing out today.

14/10/2017
B.C. Pemberton, Squamish and Chilcotins, I don’t only ride park.

Following on from the part 1 post on the trip to British Columbia, here’s some envy inducing images from our trips away from mountain bike Disney Land to some other choice spots.

Whistler’s park is famous for a reason, but then the rest of B.C. is also famous for a reason. I could’ve probably spent 3 weeks riding Squamish and come home thinking I’d had a grand trip. There’s a lot of amazing riding out there and I’ve hardly seen any of it, but I suspect I’ll be seeing more over the next few years.

None of this would have happened without Rob and his friends taking us on roadtrips away from Whistler and lending out assorted gear and advice so I raise a craft IPA/fizzy French lager to y’all in gratitude and hope I can repay the favour in Chamonix at some point. Cheers also to Lorne for doing most of the organising and logistics for the trip, and taking the better photographs!

Here’s some pictures and pretention that I scribbled down at the time in the absence of a coherent write up on 3 weeks riding.

I’m a little confused by Rob and Andy’s chat of “a good climbing trail”. Normally this is called a chairlift. Here in Pemberton it seems to be a flowing trail cut up the hill. It is a pleasant enough way gain height for sure, but a little frustrating not to just push straight up through the zig zags and gain height with speed an efficiency.

B.C. verses France I guess.

For the afternoon we swap pedalling for shuttling in Rob’s F150 truck. The 19 year old V8 behemoth makes it hard to take the moral high ground on e-bikes, but when you’re lapping a trail as fun as Reserectum the moral high ground is a mute point.

B.C. verses France.

There used to be a trail called “One trick pony”. Then the forest got harvested and the trail destroyed. From the dust arose “Glue Factory”.

As a group of 7 we drop in in roughly guessed order of speed. After 30 seconds Rob stops at the start of the clear cut. ‘Reet good that. J.P. and Joe arrive to similar comments. Lorne arrives swatting himself and complaining about having been stung.
We look up the hill.
The screaming starts.
Ali and Esther are busy being engulfed by a swarm of hornets we’d disturbed.

The group continues for another 30 seconds of trail. ‘Reet good etc. etc.

Rob arrives, compresses out of a turn and superman front flips off the trail into the clear cut debris about 3 meters below. Somehow he’s completely unscathed but his four ride old rear wheel is toast. Or taco.

What’ll the next 30 seconds bring?

It’s about 7pm, the sun is going down behind the truck cab, behind the three bikes on the tailgate, behind the hills. Beck’s ‘Loser’ is on the radio and we’re taking the piss out of each other after obscenely good day’s riding in Squamish. This is one of the best bits of biking, and the hardest to capture or explain.

Yesterday we saw Momma Grizzly and her 3 cubs crossing the road. This was cool because they were 75m away and we had Rob’s dirty great truck to hide in if they headed our way.

Today, I’m leading out above the treeline. The trail’s traversing below the summit of a mountain I never found the name of. I see a load of fresh earth ahead but, being a veteran of many an alpine trail, clock it as a freshly fallen small landslide and keep going.
I notice the landslide starts from just above the trail. Odd. I keep going.
I notice the landslide has a great big hollow as its start point. I keep going.
I notice the landslide has bear shit all over it. I stop.
Shit.
I appear to have ridden straight up to a grizzly’s hibernation den. Rob then arrives with the key thing that Goldielocks never had. Bear spray.

It’s not a new complaint, but generally the best biking doesn’t get photographed. Who wants to stop mid-train as you slide down some new best trail ever with ridiculous scenery and colours around you. Aye it’d make a grand photo but that’s not worth killing the moment for. And that’s before you start with the issue that the photo only illustrates the moment, it doesn’t include the climb to the trail, the atmosphere, the enjoyment of the trail up to this point and the anticipation of the trail still to come

Hence, there are very few photos to illustrate just how good the Chilcotan combination of Hightrail-Molly Dog-Pepper Dog-Kens Trail is (and it might be the best 1000m vert of singletrack I’ve ridden) but you can extrapolate from the scenery shots of the climb, the pictures from Ridge-o-rama and Cinnabar the day before, and your own memories of that. time. when.

As I might have mentioned, there’s bears out there. Riding into a bear would be a bad thing, so to minimise the chances of this you start a little chant of “hey bear” as you approach blind corners, thick shrubs and the like. This rises to “HEY BEAR!” as you get faster.

At first I wondered if it evolves a Pavlovian response in the bear, instead of the ringing of a bell getting the saliva going the sound of our anti-bear call would actually get Yogi ready for a 70kg snack. I’m now wondering if I’VE got the association conditioning, where whenever I’m riding a grand trail I’ll start yelling “hey bear” to the confusion (and possible consternation) of French hikers.

I’m not sure I’ve really conveyed the awesomeness of this trip, and to be honest I don’t really need to. You either want to go to B.C. or you don’t, this page isn’t going to influence you either way. I’m glad I went, I want to go back, but I’m also pretty happy to be living where I am with all the Chamonix trails on my doorstep, and the infinite choices spreading out from there. Squamish, Finale, Pemberton, Verbier, Chilcotins, Aosta. There’s not much to whinge about there.

See you next trip everyone, cheers!

12/10/2017
B.C. Whistler, I only ride park.

British Columbia is mountain biking. The sport might have been born (kind of) in Marin County USA, but it grew up and had kids in B.C. If you want to get an idea of the benchmarks in biking, and to see what’s behind all the shiny images in most mtb media, you have to take a trip to B.C.

I finally took a trip to B.C., travelling over with Lorne and meeting up with assorted friends from Chamonix and the UK. It was, as expected, amazing. The trails, the biking culture, the infrastructure and the space were everything the internet had told me they’d be and some.

All of this made for a great trip, and I can’t thank my friends, the folks I met and the trail builders enough for it.

What it didn’t make for though, is a great blog post. It’s not even going to scrape through as an average blog post. Three weeks is a long time to either remember everything that happened, or condense everything that happened. There’s far too many varied experiences to try my usual crutch of finding a random fact that interests me and writing around it without missing most of the trip, and far too much material to just write about the whole trip in an even remotely interesting way.

Instead I’ve channeled my inner Partridge and, by scribbling notes during the trip, have managed to drag this out to two posts, one for Whistler and one for not Whistler, of random bits and bobs that happened to space the photos. I’d focus on the photos.

This is the Whistler one:

With an 18 month build up to getting here, the stress and anticipation of a day or so dragging 60kg of luggage around planes, trains and automobiles & a healthy dose of jetlag…..the first lap was always going to be an anti-climax.

Lorne was obviously keen to start on a grand trail. Not too hard to ease us in, but fun riding, and with his experiences from last year had been set on “Crank it up” for a whiles. It’s not that it was a bad trail, far from it, just between the wheel sized craters in the berms and my struggle to get the speed for the jumps I got to the bottom of the hill a bit “meh”.

The second trail was a different story. We’re on blue velvet and, at this point, Lorne is leading out. The trail arcs almost 180 degrees right on a dirt wall of a berm, straight into a second berm, the mirror of the previous. As I look round the corner to see what’s coming up next I see Lorne fade out of sight, slightly sideways in the air, with the accompanying giggle. At this point I get park.

The park chairlifts are pretty sociable, if you’re lapping on your own but want company it doesn’t take long to meet someone to ride with.

Heading up the Garbo chair I get chatting to Gary, who is riding a bike that looks like a session. Because it’s a session. I ask how Freight Train is riding, I’ve not ridden it yet and my first lap down jump trails is always…entertaining….as I try and get my speed right.

A couple minutes later, 52 year old Gary is leading out down Freight Train and giving me a tow into each kicker. Seems there’s plenty of time left to get better in the air.

Top of the World, TOTW, is apparently a “must do” when you’re in Whistler. A must do despite being an extra 20$ for a short chairlift to access one trail much like all the trails Chamonix has off all lifts above the tree line. I digress. The TOTW trail is fun enough, but the best reason for going up there with a bike is to then get into the trails like Khyber, Babylon, Ride don’t Slide. All of these used to be accessed by a long push up the hill, but now for a mere $20 you can ride a fun enough trail into them.

We were stopped for photos about half way down the TOTW trail when one of Rob’s bike patrol colleagues passed us and said he was going to be needed. A couple minutes down the trail a rider was receiving CPR. His friends, assorted stopped riders and the bike patrol worked, for over an hour, to keep Derrick’s blood and oxygen moving around his body whilst arranging for helicopter transport from the mountain to hospital. After he’d been carried into the helicopter and the area tidyed back up we continued on to Khyber, Upper Babylon, See colours and puke and other classics, my first rides of “real” B.C. trails instead of bike park, followed by a BBQ.

The next day we found out Derrick had died of a heart attack. Sometimes the world is shit.

https://nsmb.com/articles/memoriam-derrick-rockhill/

Ride don’t Slide is a bit of a pedal and push away from the park when TOTW isn’t open. I’m on my own in old growth forest with no human sounds other than the tick of my freehub. I start thinking about bears and cougars.

The bears seem sufficiently vegetarian however the cougars are more of a concern. Several folk have told me you only see a cougar when it wants you to see it, seeing a cougar is fine, it’s when you can’t see the cougar you have to worry.

I can’t see any cougars.

There’s a lot to be said for countries where you’re the top of the food chain, but this trail is good enough to beat that argument.

It’s damp out. Make a cup of tea, have a sandwich, and put on waterproofs.

Shady acres into Del Bocca Vista in Whistler hero dirt is as good as it gets. Renegade in Whistler humidity, is not.

I’d love to know what freak of geological nature makes Whistlers dirt so tacky in the wet, ‘cos it’d be great to get that sorted in Chamonix. The rock is just as slick though.

There’s a word to describe the feeling of realising for the last 350m of climbing you’ve been on the wrong trail. And there’s no other trail cutting across to where you want to be, And there’s no alternative descent from where you are. And logging service road back to the trail head to start anew the 600m climb is your only option.

There’s a word for this feeling, but I don’t know what it is…

10/10/2017
Le Thuile: Day of the Dead (forearms).*

Last year La Thuile hosted round 4 of the EWS. It won the race of the year accolade and was raved about by racers and press alike as “real” enduro (eh!?!) with thousands of meters of descent on rough and raw tracks. Val di Sole times a million as Team America might say.

I had a great time last year, but I got smashed. The long harsh trails were a reminder that I’m not too fit and my arms are a bit pathetic. Well not so much a reminder as a mugging down a dingy back alley, but you get the idea.

So, fast forward a year and since the last race at La Thuile, I’ve broken both arms and wrists, spent almost 5 months with an arm in a brace to stop me using it, and a couple weeks ago decided to dislocate my right middle finger to balance up my pre-existing feebleness at holding onto the handlebars.

Seems like a good idea to go back to La Thuile and get some Superenduro action….

Fortunately for those of us making up the numbers, races are a great excuse to catch up with people and win at practice, which is pretty much how the weekend went. Lots of groups of riders from all over the world sitting about in the sunshine and riding some of the best trails on the planet.

The Superenduro crew put on an amazing event, the key things were prioritised: Amazing venue, great trails, well taped, relaxed vibe. The less important things came second. How it should be really.

Only one stage was completely common to the EWS, this year’s first stage which was also last year’s fifth stage. Last year this was my worst stage, the relentless steepness and braking took its toll on my arms and by the end I was having to choose between 3 or 4 finger braking, which didn’t leave many fingers for holding onto the bars. So I was curious how it would go this year, just taking it nice ‘n’ easy and preserving my energy for the lower third. Answer? 30 seconds slower. Bit humiliating that really, though at least I was able use the brakes at the end this time.

The rest of the stages were shorter, but still steep, loose, dusty and fun. I’ve said it plenty times before, but if you own a #enduro bike, go to La Thuile, it is every bit as good as everyone says. Though mibbies a wee bit rougher than it was a few years ago.

Mechanicals did seem to be a bit of an issue. About 350 riders signed on on Saturday morning. By the end of practice 12 had already had to pull out through mechanical or injury, by the end of Sundays racing another 40 were missing from the sheet. Racing the stages, the side of the track was littered with bikes missing a wheel whilst the rider tried to stuff a tube in as quick as possible. At the end of each stage other riders would be trying to fix cooked brakes, blown shocks, buckled wheels or even snapped bars. It’s going to sound like an advert for my Airdrop Edit, but it was pretty amazing to sail through all this without having to touch the bike all weekend other than to put some chain lube on after Saturday practice and tighten a solitary loose spoke after Sundays race. Oh, and stop about 30 seconds into stage 4 to switch the rear shock back from climb to descend mode, but I’m no sure I can blame the bike for that one.

So if I was such an also ran this year, why did I enjoy the racing so much? Usually I put the unrelated rant at the start of the writing then try and claw it back to some sort of bike relevance half way through. This time, it’s going the other way round. If you’re only here for the biking stuff, change the channel now, possibly to see what Ben Winder made of it all.

Dopamine. The neural transmitter that, according to the well known, peer reviewed, journal “The Sun” makes “cupcakes as addictive as cocaine” is responsible for all manner of stuff in the brain, but the best known bit is releasing reward chemicals into the heid and making you feel just smashing thanks.

It might be a surprise to you, but it turns out dopamine is a little more complicated than The Sun makes out. As well as being released following success or something that makes you feel good (say, a really tasty cupcake for example) and making you feel good about yourself, hence wanting to repeat that behaviour (that was a really good cupcake, I shouldn’t, but just one more) it gets released following worrying, scary, near miss events too (holy crap, there’s a tarantula in my cupcake! I wonder if there’s one in the next cupcake?).

Ah yes, racing long and tough courses with minimal practice. I had a clean weekend with no crashes and in control all the time, but you still spend plenty time going “eek” as whole sections of track you’d forgotten about appear, or sections you kinda remembered turned out to have changed somewhat since you rode them a few hundred riders ago. And if you’re really cracking on, you need to take some actual risks and get near your limits. That’s when the near misses (or near hits really) start to rack up and you hit full dopamine house. It’s addictive and you go back for more.

And racing in Italy being especially good? Well, what could possibly trump a cupcake other than good coffee and gelato?

Of course, the brain is way more complicated than that. All manner of other chemicals are complementing and countering the work of dopamine and messing with our emotions. But if you want to know more, perhaps consult some form of expert rather than an unqualified rant on the internet. Seriously, what’s wrong with you people.

*RIP George A Romero.

17/07/2017