Chamonix Bike Blog

Category: Road trip

Road

A change is as good as a rest. Apparently. Road biking is definitely a change from mountain bikes, but I’m not sure it’s a rest.

A game of word association is unlikely to link Chamonix and road biking. Or me and road biking for that matter, but I tried a 29er once (twice now I think about it) and it didn’t seem that bad so might as well give this road biking lark a go. That and I had friends in town who wanted to go road biking.

Hence a quick bit of internet research later a very much not lycra clad crew of riders and borrowed bikes rolled out of Chamonix from a relaxed 10am start. Progress was initially slow as said combination of riders and borrowed bikes resulted in frequent stops to raise saddles, angle saddles, re-align saddles.

By Vaudagne we’d all began to bond with our bikes and, having negotiated the roadworks…road bike tyres not being as forgiving as mtb tyres when faced with potholes… started making progress past Servoz and along the back roads towards Sallanches.

With the cliffs of the Fiz range towering above us on the right and the Arve valley spread out below us on the left there was plenty to distract, but those slick tyres descend at a fair lick and the handling isn’t quite what I’m used to, so generally best just to ignore the sights. Easier to ignore was the Chaine des Aravis in front of us, which we were planning on riding behind.

Past Sallanches and still we were able to crack on at a fair lick. So far so easy this road bike game. A convenient back road takes you parallel with the autoroute along the Arve valley, but far enough away not to be disturbed by the sound of the road. Even when the back road ended, the 10km along past Magland to Cluses passed quickly, probably because we were heading for the first food break of the day.

From our brief research into the world of road biking we’d learnt that cafe stops are key, we were more than happy to comply with this rule. Espresso and panini prepped us for the main event of the day, the climb to the Col de la Colombière .

Another part of our research had revealed David Millar’s words on the Col de la Colombière from his 2010 Tour du France. “From the lowest slopes of the Colombière, I was adrift, unable to stop my rapid slide out of the back of the bunch…..There were just under 180 km remaining in the stage and four mountains to climb. I was unequivocally, irredeemably, fuc..” well, you get the idea.

The climb starts pleasantly enough. You cruise out of Cluses and past the first marker post, declaring 17km to go to the col, and currently you’re climbing a 2% gradient. As each marker post past, kilometre after kilometre, that gradient would rise and rise. Still for now, in the first 10km as the road winds through the trees, the climb is deceptively easy. But then, as you leave the trees into the full glare of the sun, and the gradient passes 8%, David Millar’s words start to ring in your ears.

With 3km to go, the col is in clear sight, and is getting closer with every turn of the pedals. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get any lower. Instead the road just seems to rear up steeper and steeper in front of you. As if that wasn’t demoralising enough, by now my backside was beginning to really feel the difference between my 160mm travel, fat tyred, fat saddled mtb and the skinny tyred, razor saddled rocket I’d borrowed. Sure it was fast, but did it have to be so painful to achieve it?

The col eventually fell below the wheels, with the view of the Borand valley opening in front and, perhaps more relevantly, the cafe appearing to our right, a healthy number of patrons already installed and recovering from their efforts.

We were half way round, and no matter what we did, it was downhill for a while again. Somewhere between the Col and the next village of Grand Borand we were skipping along at about 50mph, making up time from our slightly slower ascent. The descents always pass quicker than the climbs though and soon enough we were dropping down the gears and climbing towards La Clusaz.

There’s an open boulangerie in La Clusaz which we rode past as there was nowhere to sit. surely there’d be an open cafe further into town. After much searching we discovered there wasn’t, but the next climb, the Col des Aravis, was only 400m. We’d last until the cafe at the top.

After the length and gradient of the Colombiere the Col des Aravis is a walk in the park, barely breaching 8% and soon we were at the top looking through the options for food. Unfortunately these options mostly seemed to be closed until 1830 and with the way the clouds were gathering we were keen to be somewhere else by that time. Anyway, it’s downhill from the col, we could stop for food in Giettaz.

Whit a downhill it was too. Descending on a road bike isn’t the same as the frenetic melee of mountain biking, but has it’s own rewards. Less action movie, more like the opening scenes of the Italian Job, working a classic car through the corners. Drop gear, drop gear, brake, turn into the apex, straighten up, pedal, up a gear, up a gear, coast and repeat. The descent from the Col des Aravais wound beautifully down the hill into the very quiet village of Giettaz and its open boulangerie.

The open boulangerie which had run out of sandwiches, and pretty much everything else. Onwards to Flumet.

Flumet also turned a blank. On to Praz sur Arly.

There was no repeating of our La Clusaz error, at the first open boulangerie we stopped and bought the last 3 items in the cabinet. Ham and cheese croissants. The owner even got some deck chairs out for us to sit in whilst we savoured our savory snacks.

Suitably refreshed we got back in the saddle for the last push. They might be uncomfortable, but road bikes cover the ground a lot faster than a mountain bike, in no time at all we’d given up on more food in Megeve and were starting the long descent down to Le Fayet. A descent that was spurred on by the view of Sallanches slowly getting enveloped by a rain storm slowly rolling up the valley.

From the Le Fayet train station it’s just 500 meters of climbing back up to Chamonix, but then, there’s several station bars keen to serve you a cold pint of lager, and that rain storm was getting a lot closer, and it was starting to get a bit dark. To cut a long list of excuses short….we caught the train home.

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16/09/2015
Pila. Pinning/pining.

A long time ago in a galaxy (small highland town) far,
far away….

The first copy of “Dirt the downhill mountain bike magazine” arrived, some time later than it did in the rest of the UK as that’s generally what happens when you live in the north of the UK. For a bunch of kids who were doing a mix of BMX and motocross on bikes totally unsuited to the job at hand, and definitely not wearing lycra, it was a revelation that there were actually other people like us. All over the place.

Obviously we all started buying Dirt.

Several issues in (canny mind how far in, it’s not important anyway) there was an article about a bunch of riders deciding that the southern English DH races were shite (and they were back then) so piled in a van and drove to Pila to race a round of the Italian series.

That seems pretty reasonable now, but back then it was unheard of. If you were the best of the best at DH then obviously you spent much of the summer driving about the alps to race the Grundigs (and get drunk and smash stuff like a true Brit abroad), but the idea that as a normal rider you could just head off and ride this amazing terrain straight off a lift (this was before the Nevis Range DH was accessed by the lift, you still had to push up) was a revelation.

But there was more to it than that. There was the idea that bikes, DH bikes, weren’t just something you did at the weekend or as a kid, but a lifestyle like skiing or climbing. I’d always known that getting out the country and heading to the mountains for the winter was a perfectly sensible thing to do, now I’d had the epiphany that you could do that for the summer too.

A lot has changed since then. My #enduro bike is years ahead of any DH bike of that time, Dirt has just ceased publication. I now spend most of my summer riding some of the best trails in the world as and when I want to.

And now I’ve finally gone to Pila.

It was a long time coming, year after year I would be planning to go only to get injured, break the bike or, most frequently, the Mont Blanc tunnel be too busy. The blog’s even made it there before I did. But finally, I’ve made the 40 kilometre drive from Chamonix and caught the closing day of the 2015 Pila summer.

For 7 short hours Lorne, Sandy and I lapped and lapped and lapped the bike park, both the shorter (500m descent) upper chairlift accessed main park and the lower (1150m descent) home runs. We even failed to stop for coffee during the day which, for a trip to ride in Italy, is probably a first (and the only low point of the day).

I’m not going to describe the trails, it’s boring to write and worse to read, and Lorne did a good enough job after his first visit. Also we never really knew what trail we were on they all cross so much. But…I will make mention of the IXS DH track as it’s without doubt the hardest ‘official’ bike trail I’ve ridden if you stick to the quick lines, and probably even if you don’t.

I’ve new found respect for the strength of DH rims and tyres, absolutely nae idea how you can land in some of the rock gardens at any speed without writing off the wheels. Pretty much anywhere else something that hard would be closed most of the time, but if it’s not hard how can you progress? Talking of which, was pretty cool to see so many weans out on the trail and riding fast. Though what do you aspire to when this is your local hill?

Anyway, thanks Dirt for opening my eyes to another life all those years ago, I’m off to price DH bikes.

11/09/2015
Last chance to see. Samoens

Life is a temporary affair. As an organism you get between a few seconds and a thousand or so years on earth. As a species it seems you get about 10 million years until you’re outta here. As a rule, it’s the mass extinctions that’ll get you. There’s probably been five already (alas details are sketchy, there’s not many folk left afterwards to keep a record), which between them mean that 99.5% of the species that have been, have been and gone.

Today we’re possibly going into a sixth mass extinction with species getting the chop at a rate about 100 to 1000 times faster than “background” extinction. The interesting thing with this one is that whilst the others were as a result of natural events, the blame for this one is pinned square on our love of carbon and aluminium bits made in China.

Of course mass extinction isn’t all bad news (unless you’re the species becoming extinct I guess), every event has been followed by a period of diversification as new species arrive blinking into the light and leap up the reordered food chain. It’s how we got where we are today, thank you Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.

What’s this got to do with a bike blog then? Very little.

The Enduro World Series circus arrives in Samoens this week ready for the racing weekend next. Whilst you’re not allowed to practice the special stages under French rules, there’s nothing about driving 45 minutes over to have a go on the trails 8 days before the race. With so many trails and no idea which will be used, it’s unlikely you’ll ride the right ones.

Either way, as of today all EWS riders are banned (that needs some caps-lock. BANNED) from the whole Samoens bike park. On foot or bike. So the weekend there was your last, err, chance to, umm, see the trails. Too tenuous a link?

So Spence, Nina and me met in Samoens last week to get a feel for the trails in the dry. This is an important point as the last time we were here it was not dry, which is sort of where the intro comes in.

The Coupe du France race here last summer was a quagmire. One of our first trails of the day included sections of Stage 1/3 which had been killed by the passing of 300 riders twice the year before. But, springing from either side of the trail was numerous new trails, similar but different.

After next weekend, when it will no doubt have rained and large quantities of earth transported from the hill to bikes and into the back of 300 riders cars and vans, there will be another set of destroyed trails on the hill with hub deep ruts and blown out berms. And hopefully from there more trails will be built, the old trails will be absorbed back into the forest and no one will die out.

Anyway, for anyone that wants to know, the trails under the GMC lift in Samoens are amazing. A lot like Innerleithen/Pleny off piste/Les Houches (pick according to geographic experience) in that they’re fairly steep, rooty, tight n twisty though trees yet often silly fast in straight lines (still through trees). The pictures probably say more. And if you’re reading this to get some handy tips for the race, Nicolai, Clementz, Graves is my thoughts, with cut down spikes and some Gore-tex. See you there.

13/07/2015
Saleve: The trail strikes back

Saleve is not that well known for it’s biking, but on the off chance you meet someone who’s ridden there one of the things they’ll tell you is it’s a bad choice in the wet. Slick and slippy mud coating roots and smooth limestone with steep gradients to maximise your travel from the trail and bike if/when you fall.

It’s wet just now, but Sandy and I figured it couldn’t be more wet than Chamonix where May started with the average monthly rainfall dropping on the 1st, then the 2nd and 3rd not being much drier. As a result of the sky falling, the mountains started falling. Huge wet snow slides coming off the Chamonix Aiguilles reached as far as the valley floor, and rockslides on the Aiguille Rouge side did the same. Lots of trails cross under these avalanche corridors, so the Petit Balcons Nord and Sud, and anything above them, have been closed by the Mairie until further notice.

Which doesn’t leave many options to ride a bike.

So we went to Saleve.

Unsurprisingly, with the cloud level being about 1/3 the height of the hill and the rain still falling lightly, there weren’t many other people waiting for the telepherique. The first lap was down the usual well built official(ish) trails towards the front of the hill, though we opted for the network of tracks down towards Monnetier as they’re less built so we wouldn’t trash saturated berms or jumps……and they’re a little less steep so we had a little more chance of making it down attached to the bike.

Surprisingly the trails weren’t too bad. With so much water about the mud was pretty thin and didn’t clog you or the bike too badly. The trails were even grippier than I’ve ridden them in places where they’d washed the bedrock completely clean.

Back to the carpark we rinse off the bikes and head up for another lap. Just as we reached the top telepherique station we broke though the cloud, blue skies above and extensive views of more cloud but below us instead of above.

Heading down the hill meant we’d lose this rare opportunity to top up on vitamin D (when you leave Scotland, your ration gets taken away from you. Aye, you thought it was methadone everyone was queueing for outside Boots, y’ken noo eh). Also, I’d heard there were good trails in the other direction than we normally take so we chose not to choose dh, but chose something different. Pedalling up the hill.

Turns out there’s a Buddhist retreat and an observation station up there. And some roads, the odd field, cows etc.

Might also be some views but all we could see was a sea of clouds stretching out into the distance. There’s also lots of handy direction signs, one of which suggested we head for the Telepherique (Gare Inferieure) via the Grande Gorge.

I will now suggest to you that you don’t, but we didn’t know that at the time and dropped in. To be fair the trail was pretty good at first, a little on the narrow and exposed side, but nothing too bad. Then however we reached the gorge bit of the name, which was less than grand on a bike. Steep and narrow on a mix of rubble and slick rocks which would have been challenge enough just downclimbing normally in the current conditions, but whilst trying to hold onto your bike was pretty tricky.

Fortunately it didn’t last for the whole descent and, despite some false starts where we thought the difficulties had ended buuuut they hadn’t, we were back on some good trails again.

In fact, as we got further down the hill they went from good to great (grand even? Too much, ok.). Surprisingly reminiscent of Finale with undulating trails snaking through deciduous forest and peppered with limestone rocks that could either be a risk to your dérailleur or something to pop off and over depending on how confident you were feeling.

The biggest difference was the vibrant greens of the forest which you can only get after a good downpour.

More exploring to be done, but not today. Might try and go in the dry too next time. And not on May the fourth. Saving you from poor titles it will.

04/05/2015
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