Category: Uncategorized

There’s 3 certainties in life; death, taxes and the annual what-lifts-are-open-when post appearing in April.

I’m not dead, it’s April in France so we know all about tax. I guess it’s time for the list of lift opening dates.

Chamonix

Bellevue: 7th June – 14th September (same as 2024)

Flegere: 7th June – 21st September (same as 2024) then 18th October – 2nd November

Le Tour: 14th June – 14th September (opening and closing 1 week later than 2024)

Planpraz/Brevent: 14th June – 14th September (same as 2024)

Tramway du Mont Blanc: 14th June – 28th September (same as 2024)

Vallorcine: 28th June – 31st August (opening 1 week later, closing 1 week earlier than 2024)

Prarion: 21st June – 7th September + the weekend 14/15 June (same as 2024)

Grands Montets: Closed. They’re (still) building a new lift.

Chamonix does Chamonix, but it also does a wheen of rad if you look an hour (hmm, hour-ish) away. Rad like:

La Thuile: 21st June- 7th September Probably, dates not officially up. Watch out for the UCI Enduro and DHI 3-6 July, DH track looks well well well good like.

Megeve: 28th June – 7th September. Megeve is really 2 resorts, so the Mont Blanc natural resort bit is staggered between 28th June and 7th September and the Jaillet side is always a mystery for the ages. After last years EDR/EWS there’s some more tyres on the ground around Combloux, so worth an explore. Less good are rumours of the closure of the Mont d’Arbois area due to a fight in the courts between Megeve and St Gervais over who should operate it, which would be rubbish news for both summer and winter.

St Gervais: 5th July – 1st September. In rare good news from St Gervais, rumour is the Wizz (funnest blue/green flow trail in y’aute?) is getting extended to run from Bettex to St Gervais and will be open by late spring.

Les Contamines: 28th June – 31st August. I think, first time in a long time they’ve not been first up with their summer dates!

Grand Massif: 6th June – 8th September. TBC. Assorted start and finish times across the area, with a usual caveat that these are the website gets updated late, so it’s off of rumours and guesswork. Les Carroz is go from the 21st June to 7th September, Samoens is hosting the Velo Vert festival again 6th, 7th and 8th June, Morrilion is hosting an EDR for the first time (although don’t tell anyone but the Samoens race in 2015 also went there) so expect opening weekend to be busier than a usual chilled out grand massif day. Flaine is maybe 28th June to 31st August.

Pila: 21st June – 7th September. The Gorraz Grand Grimond lift replacement of the Coulis 1 again this summer, so best 2(1)b ready for a climb…. The new lift should be open for summer 2026 but.

Portes du Soleil: 24th May – 26th October. It’s a big area, and stuff happens at different times, but it all roughly breaks down as: Les Gets Chavannes side open weekends only from 24th May Then, Les Gets, Pleny, Super Morzine all open from 13th June to 14th September, with the Charniaz lift linking Morzine to Les Gets opening in summer for the first time eva. Chatel is 27th June to 31st August, Morgins 27th June to 7th September and Champery 19th June to 26th October. Bernex “Mid June to early September” accuracy theirs not mine, along with a new shaper team for 2025.

Verbier: 7th June – 26th October. For the limited area of park at least. 19th June to 22nd September for all the funs, 5th July – 31st August for Bruson.

Les Arcs: 14th June – 14th September. Weekends only at start and end of that, but you get the jist of it.

La Clusaz: 2nd July to 31st August, and weekends all of June plus up to 21st September

All that’s grand and great for the summer. But it’s not summer yet, so if the uplift itch needs scratched now, mibbies try this non exhaustive list of spots:

Bourg Saint Maurice: The Bourg – Les Arcs Funicular used to be where you went for spring uplift, now bikes are banned until further notice. So that’s a bit rubbish. But the further notice is that mibbies playtime is on again from 13th April, just everyone will have to play nice and stick to the marked trails.

Le Fayet: The new Valleen telecabine whisks you up from Le Fayet train station to St Gervais in no time at all, is open year round and is free on the Chamonix Unlimited pass. And bikes go for free too.

Pila: Until 13th April. Even if you can’t be bothered getting on the lift it’s worth the trip to eat, drink and visit Gros Cidac, but if you’re through anyways, probably should go for at least a lap…

Les Haberes: April 19th -21st then most weekends through to the full opening 11th July to 17th Aug.

Verbier: Always! Kinda. And only from 11am…. Except 28th April – 25th May when it’s closed for repairs. But there’s a replacement bus service. Caveats done, enduro action available now from the almost always running Le Chable-Verbier telepherique.

Metabief: From the 1st May. Then every weekend until the end of September, plus lots of otherdays but frankly too complicated to understand, so just check their calendar https://www.station-metabief.com/fr/ouverture-ete

Sept Laux. Probably weekends only from 2nd May to mid June when it’ll open 7/7, but opening info seems to be some kind of guarded secret to only be revealed at the last minute, so keep an eye on the socials.

La Saleve: Is open all the time, and now even has it’s own trail building association

Monts Jura: Weekends only from 8th May to summer. Just outside Geneva, 2 lifts and more than 2 trails

Trail Taxi have already fired up the shuttles for 2024, trips to all the trails you can shake a stick at in Valais and Aosta on their website, give Jarno a shout now!

E-Bikes. I’ve got a eeb now. Every day is uplift day. Thanks SCOR!

That’s covered the certainties in life and uncertainties of lift openings. Which usually leaves room for some vague patter about how winter was better for skiing than last year, but worse for bikes. Still got out enough to get enough content (phone viewing optimized, still struggling with that one) to fill the gaps between the words.

Normally I have some random science thing I’ve liked and can tenuously link into the riding them of the post, but when the post has no riding and the main theme is that this is the last surviving thing that gets put up, there’s not much to link with.

Except, maybe….

The tardigrade. The tardigrade? Yes, the tardigrade. Like the when the lifts are opening post, they’re natures greatest survivor. The 8 legged little (very little, about 0.5mm long) invertebrates are about the only thing to have survived all 5 mass extinctions, along with Keith Richards and Shimano XT spd pedals. Having survived being jettisoned into space (for science), frozen for decades, boiled, irradiated, living at the bottom of the ocean and getting dried out, it seems likely they’ll survive the impending 6th extinction event too.

Unfortunately, unlike the blog, they can survive for years without liquid. Which would make them terrible ambassadors for Sapaudia Brewing. Although, having survived pressures of nearly 165,000psi they would be the perfect spirit animal for Krush.

Which leads to another post staple, the standard, throwaway, pretend-like-I-don’t-care plug for my guiding. alpineflowmtb you should have a look. Although also as like most years I’m pretty much fully booked already too, so check out bikevillage endlesstrailsmtb leripp and MIAS for spaces on their tours and maybe I’ll see you there.

Normally I’d now make a joke about how there might be some actual writing appearing here this summer, but realistically 2022 was the last time any creative content got published, so it’s pretty unlikely.

Bim, done.

See yous next year.

Another week, another trip to somewhere new. Or new to me at least. A trip where Lorne and I got to ride jumps and proved that it’s quite easy to outsmart ourselves and end up trapped in a greenhouse. Which leads to today’s random topic to tag bike photos onto…

The eternal quandary of whether self perception of our abilities is accurate.*

Have you heard of the Dunning Kruger effect? Even if you don’t know it by its name you’ll know it by its nature. “A cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge.” It’s been in the news a fair bit recently thanks to the queue of individuals lining up for the job of running the UK, believing that because they’ve talked about the job, worked near the job, have studied subjects tangentially related to the job; have “what it takes.” And get brutally shown that they don’t.

We all suffer from it to a greater or lesser extent. If you’re a guy then probably greater. Check out the 2019 YouGov survey where 12% of men reckoned they could take a point off Serena Williams in a game of tennis. Less reported from the same survey was 3% of women thought the same. Hot take take away, a missing rib** makes you 4 times more likely to be deluded. The more considered point (which only Serena would have been scoring) is that these people most likely had no experience of tennis beyond seeing it on the telly.

You see it out on the trail, and feeding the algorithm with endless Friday fail videos.

But before we all feel too smug, it’s pretty easy to have an inflated idea of your ability on a bike. You ride the trails you ride. If you don’t live next to a bikepark, and there’s a really hard trail nearby, it’s likely to be a walking trail and easy to write off as “impossible”. Unless you’re called Akrigg or something. Surely it’s not something that folk from somewhere else would ride regularly. Similarly, if you’re the best in your group of riding friends, then you must be good. If you’ve got nothing else to compare yourself to, well, why wouldn’t yous think you’re pretty good.

You’ve got the KOM’s to prove it and everything.

A wee dive into the research of the Dunning Kruger reveals some lovely graphs illustrating study participants test scores plotted against their self assessed ability scores. These two lines show that the more competent the individual, the closer their perceived ability is to their assessed ability. Interestingly there’s a crossover point where the most competent folks assess themselves to be worse than their actual ability.

So, the better we are at something, the better placed we are to know how good we are at it?

Makes sense.

How do we know if we’re well good or, well, deluded then? If it’s an activity with a competition structure then we could use that. Race DH against Loris Vergier and Anne Caro or BMX against Niek Kimmann and Anne Caro, or Enduro against Nico Voullioz and err, Anne Caro then you’ll know, in absolute terms, how far you are from the state of the art. And how much potential you have to improve.

Great, but what if you don’t want to race, or don’t know if you’re good enough to race, or are good enough to know racing rewards the fastest and fastest doesn’t mean best if you aren’t measuring fastest?

How about if there’s a simple grading system? French rock climbing grades are an open ended numerical system starting at 1 and currently counting up to 9, with a, b and c used to split up each numbered grade. If you regularly fall off 4b, you’re not an amazing rock climber. If you’ve lead 9c, you’re probably called Adam Ondra. Everyone knows where they sit in the pecking order and there’s never ever ever any debates or argument about what constitutes a “good” climber.

We’ve kinda got that in biking. Step up and take a bow please, ladies and gentlemen; the bike park.

The trails are graded. You ride a green OK, try the blue. Blue went well, let’s go to the red. Shredded the red, hit the black.

Good, with that problem solved, lets go to a bike park.

Crans Montana then. Somewhere I’ve ridden near loads, but never where you’re meant to. Anyone who’s been on a Bike Verbier holiday will have ridden Spanish, and it’s also the home to the Plaine Morte ride which is as easy an approach to a 2500m descent as you’re likely to find in the Alps. But I’ve never visited the bikepark. Barely even knew it existed if I’m honest until the EWS rolled into town to wreck the trails as advertising for a global audience.

So it did it’s job I guess.

Perhaps the biggest driver in visiting though was the 3 free days us lucky Chamonix season pass holders get. As ever the finances drive things. It’s the economy stupid.

The trip didn’t start particularly well. Using our free passes usually involves a visit to the sales desk, only we couldn’t find it. Eventually we wandered past the ticket barriers at the gondola up to Arnouva and asked the liftie.

Who basically just let us on the lift.

A hundred meter from the top of the gondola is the Cry d’Er chair where we repeated the procedure. The Cry d’Er chair is more evidence we weren’t in Chamonix. Luxurious padded seats, secure bike racks and a protective perspex dome should you need to hide from the elements. Getting off the chair there’s 3 bike park signs in front of you. Red trail right, Blue and Black trails left.

Pre ride, re ride, free ride and all that, we turn left for the blue trail.

Where the signs abruptly run out.

To be fair, it’s late in the season, winter snow will be here soon so I get why the signs might have been taken down, but it still took about 30 mins of randomly riding about the hill in a gradually downwards direction until we gave up finding a proper bikepark and just followed the trail with the most tyre marks on it.

Which took us directly to the start of the bikepark.

Turns out the blue and black start from a bit lower down the hill. We know what we’re doing right?

Anyways. The blue. Mellow left berm into slight roll into mellow left into, oh, doubles. For a blue it’s quite full on. After a few more doubles the trail splits into the black left and the blue right. And it’s pretty good. You can ride the blue wheels on the ground and just roll every feature, or up the speed and play in the air a bit. There’s plenty of extra curricular lines if you’re feeling creative too. Very nice.

A short pedal back to the Cry d’Er chair and we were up again. Well, after waiting about for a few minutes for chairs with bike hooks to come round and instead studying the automated mechanism to drop the perspex cover down on empty chairs and keep the seats dry, we were up again.

This time we turned right, and had to go all of 20m to find the well marked start of the trail. Much more like it. Fast, open and bigger tables and jumps. We were really starting to get into the flow of things, Lorne leading out, me cruising along a bit behind. Until I hear Lorne stop then shout back “yeah, it should be fine”

What should be fine?

Turns out the jumps are a bit bigger on the red. A dirt step down was the feature that gave our first chance to stop, look, and then push back up. We kept on working down through tables, doubles, hips, road gaps and more until pulling up at a ladder pointing to the sky. I’d say a stairway to heaven, but music was the last posts theme so I won’t.

Lorne’s just back from a month in B.C. So Lorne got to guineapig it. Beautifully built big features are well fun. And pretty safe if you do what the trail builders had intended.

Back to the lift, back to furthering our knowledge of the lift cover closure system, back to the top, back to the unsignposted traverse to the actual trails, and back to the black.

It’s starts easy enough, some proper gaps that you can’t case, but nothing too big, until you crest a rise to be suddenly faced with not flow trail, but a rock garden with, like, line choice and stuff. Just as you’ve recovered from that and are getting into the flow you suddenly find yourself on a wooden ramp several meters above a road and a few meters out from the landing. You might be able to ride that blind, but we needed a push back up.

And so continued the black. Slightly bigger features, but still really well built, interspaced with much more interesting riding than flow trail. The best section gets saved for near the end. If you’ve seen any Candide Thovex edits from the year France was closed, you’ll have seen that Crans is filled with canyon lines. Well, turns out it’s not just during winter these are in play. Definitely one of the most unique sections of trail I’ve ridden in a bike park.

Which is kinda the problem with the simple grading system. It’s not that simple.

The features on the black weren’t a huge step up (see what I did there) in difficulty from the red, certainly compared to the jump (ha) between the red and blue. What made the gap (boom tsch) in grades was the technical bits inbetween which, for your average Chamonix/Tweed Valley/Finale/Other-not-so-jumpy-trail-destination resident was pretty easy going. Definitely not what we’d call black, or even red. The hardest stuff for us was leaving the ground. Is that a sign of a well aligned awareness of our abilities? Or mibbies that perhaps we’re no quite as good as we think we are?

And does it matter?

Maybe ignorance is bliss. If someone’s having the time of their yoloing life, hopelessly out of the depth but going for it anyways and getting away with it then, well, cool no? Or in more academic terms, does awareness of ability matter when misplaced optimism can lead people to experience their situation more positively and overconfidence may help them achieve even unrealistic goals?

Surely presence in the moment is more important, just enjoy it and not worry about ranking everyone relative to each other, deluded or otherwise. I think I’m happier creating a story for myself about my ability, it helps the gnawing sensation that life has limited purpose and meaning, perhaps never did, and that if we don’t make up something for ourselves then it all gets very dark, very quickly.

Of course that all assumes that the story we tell ourselves isn’t hurting anyone else, hold the deluded and underachieving politicians feet to the fire.

There had been plans to go for a bit of an explore and see what singletrack there was to lap from the lifts but, to be honest, we don’t get to play on bigger, well built features very often, and the sun was out, so we just kept the full face lids on and spent the rest of the day riding jumps, getting to link the features in full runs without the pushing back up the hill bit. And failing to find an answer to how to know where we sit on that Dunning Kruger curve of confidence v competence.

Last lift rolled round and we lined up one final time. By now we were pretty sure where the sensors for the lift lid closing mechanism were and, keen to test our mastery of the system, dodged the sensor and congratulated ourselves as the perspex cover smoothly lowered itself and we accelerated out the lift station. My, what experts we are at this. But it’s still quite warm out, so lets lift the lid back up shall we. Yup, just lift the lid. Maybe we need to push it harder?

Is there a switch somewhere?

Can you remember if it opens automatically at the top?

Where’s that Dunning Kruger curve again?

*I did have an environment thing all written to coincide with COP27, how a 0.32 degree rise of temperature seems like such a small amount to change but will have huge repercussions on the weather, just like how small changes in technique or approach can have have a disproportionately large effect on your riding. But it was so depressing I couldn’t post it, so cobbled together this.

**There’s meant to be one of my wee links in here to a religious explanation for why gender doesn’t dictate how many ribs you get, but then I read a few of the arguments and decided mibbies I don’t want any code associating me with that. So just use your own scientific arguments. Or imagination.

Also, this is another episode brought to you by the wonders of phone cameras, as there wasn’t ever an intention to end up with a blog, just the process of pushing back up after checking features kinda lends itself to taking photos.

I like music me. Rubbish at making it, but I can still enjoy it.

Envious of those wistful lads at parties who’d sit down and start playing guitar to the adoration of all, I got my first real six string and tried learning to play. Mostly in the hope a certain someone would be impressed. In short, 1 thumb, 4 fingers, 6 strings just doesn’t add up for me, I barely learnt enough cords to play in a punk band, and she wasn’t impressed.

I quickly realised that I’m atrocious at playing music and vowed never to inflict my attempts on anyone. There’s a name for people who persevere with subjecting their badly thought out and executed ideas on the world whether they like it or not. Politicians.

However, being rubbish at playing music doesn’t stop me loving listening to it. From the C F & G chords at the heart of punk to the modern complexities of composers like Anna Meridith, queen of the Shepard tone.

The Shepard Tone I hear you say? Or at least for the sake of narrative construct I do. Yes, the Shepard tone. In the words of Franz Ferdinand (I’m not saying the only musicians worth listening to are Scottish, but….):

“Always and always and always ascending

Opening line leaves an uncertain ending

Always and always and always ascending

The chords seem to pause”

Using a song about the Shepard tone to explain the Shepard tone is a little meta, but does the job.

Basically it’s a clever musical construct where you, the listener, get the impression the pitch is constantly rising, or falling, despite it being on an infinitely repeatable loop.

“Always and always and always ascending

The Shepard misleads so you think you’re transcending

Always and always and always ascending

Pause the progression”

Clever eh.

Ever been on a bike ride like that?

Like a song, you can start and finish a ride in the same place, or on completely different notes, but if it’s a human powered endeavour then chances are the ride is going to feel like you start by always, and always, and always ascending.

Before a bite of lunch and then a short descent.

You might have gone up and down the same vertical metric but thanks to relative uphill / downhill speeds, the time is skewed very much in one direction (who are not a Scottish band, see my point yet?).

Normally at least.

Every so often you end up on a ride that has a little bit more creativity. The trail, the landscape, the conditions all combine to fool the head into thinking the infinitely repeatable loop is actually headed one way only. “The Shepard misleads so you think you’re transcending”

I’d be stretching it a bit to say the climb from the lac Roseland to Col de la Sauce felt like a descent, but being on a very pedallable mix of tarmac and gravel for 700m, then an engaging mix of pushing and pedalling along to the 2538m high point of the Crete des Gittes, it really didn’t feel like 1000m of height gain.

Perfect late autumn alpine weather and the familiar, but not overly so, views of Beaufortain probably helped. As did the occasional patch of snow, ice and frictionless greased rock. I guess you don’t notice your burning calves so much if you’re constantly on your toes.

Time for a bite of lunch before a short descent. I had sandwiches, Lorne quiche. Lorne definitely won lunch.

We make a U-turn and start the descent. Apparently U-turns are all the rage right now. In reverse the Crete des Gittes is even better. Less time absorbed by the views, more time negotiating with yourself to compromise between a pace fast enough for your inner Kilian Bron, but slow enough to manage the odd patch of snow or grease next to an always and always and always steeper than you’d like drop.

The Crete is just the warm up though, or an Anacrusis if we’re playing musical reference bingo.

From the Col de la Sauce the trail heads back north east. Nothing outstanding at first, but still a fine and fun example of that classic “narrow band of singletrack through alpine meadows” with strong backdrop and the occasional misplaced rock to keep you conflicted as to which you should be watching for.

Crossing the Torrent de la Gittaz (why couldn’t it be the Torrent de la Sauce!?!) a couple of times, the trail starts getting more engaging, more interesting, with trickier little rock steps to manage and the occasional hint of exposure as the river starts to cut deeper into the valley floor.

The occasional flat or even uphill sections mean you’re not really burning that much height even if it feels like it.

The Shepard tone makes its magic by using overlapping, looped, rising pitch (or falling pitch, but usually rising) scales which are played louder or quieter out of sync.

So, as one scale reaches its highest note and nears needing to have to start again from the lowest note in its sequence, it fades quieter to be overtaken by a louder scale that’s earlier in its journey to its highest pitch, which in turn fades out to be replaced by the next scale that’s gradually getting louder. Like the aural equivalent of a spinning barbers pole, or an M.C. Escher painting, or the Barrage de la Gittaz.

Our ride managed its magic by overlapping a mix of scenery, no stress environment and regular stops to record the magic onto memory card so that whenever we thought we were going uphill, a new distraction came along.

The sacrifices we make for your content.

Back to the trail and the unavoidable sense of the valley walls narrowing in on you stops you from having any time to spare pondering the intricacies of what happens when cognitive science meets music.

You can’t escape the feeling that the trail is building to something. I guess we could say a crescendo.

But first, there’s a pause (caesura). One more river crossing, with the foundations for a bridge but no bridge, which feels like it should have been a musical reference but was instead quite literal.

After a dismount, quick game of wet-rock-hopscotch and sprachle back up the other side, we drop in to the main act.

All good trails have something that sets them apart, it might be a particularly fine sequence of corners, an exemplary natural drop or an exquisitely picturesque ridge.

For the Col de la Sauce descent it’s an improbable rough-hewn trail, hacked from the side of a cliff, at points forming a barrel overhead to surf your way through.

Radical, dude.

Just don’t fall right.

It’s a cool bit of trail alright, but all good things come to an end (all bad things too I hope) and spat out the end of the tube you abruptly change tempo from 100% rock to 100% dirt and a fun line through the vegetation. So also a pretty cool bit of trail. Just don’t get too excited at the sudden lack of consequence and repeatedly try popping off rocks only to find in mid-air the landing isn’t quite what you were hoping for.

Aren’t modern suspension forks amazing.

We’re into the coda now, but still without doubt descending. Or at least as far as the plateau before the Lac de la Gittaz and a choice to be made. Ascending 150m over the Col de sur Fretes or 110m above the barrage?

We chose the latter, who doesn’t like a good looksee at a dam, but over the col is definitely the most direct way back if you’re doing a circular ride. You choose your own adventure, you do you.

Like a song, you can start and finish in the same place, or on completely different notes. For all this trail feels like descending on descending, where the Shepard tone is infinite, hills ain’t.

“Don’t be concerned

It’s just the way that gravity works ’round here”

We could easily pick a note to end on, which in our case was a bar. Musicians have only their imagination as the limit for wherever they end their track, although I suspect quite a few end in a bar too.

Eitherways, a fine resolution to a fine trail.

At some point today, the Artemis 1 rocket should have been launching on the first stepping stone mission to go back to the future moon. Obviously, space travel is hard and complicated, so that’s been cancelled. Again.

The last time a human stood on the moon was the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972, near 50 years ago. Before even that though, there was Apollo 8. In December 1968 the 3 astronauts of Apollo 8 became the first humans to see the dark side of the moon. Apollo 11 gets the plaudits for landing on the moon, but Apollo 8’s hard, complicated, journey into the completely unknown was what made it possible.

It wasn’t easy. In 1962 Kennedy gave his famous speech ” We choose to go to the Moon in this decade….. and do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. ”

Obviously, this was little to do with doing hard things for hard things sake and mostly because the USSR had kinda jumped ahead by firing man, dog and tortoise into space and he needed a big bold statement to put the U.S. back on the top of the world. Initially he’d thought of creating drinking water for the whole world, but later settled on shooting for the moon.

Which is where Apollo 8 comes in, as they had to shoot for the moon, and miss. By about 100km (or miles as those imperial heathens insisted on using)

The entire project is maybe the best example of what humans can do if you put enough clever, motivated people in a room together and throw lots of money at them. Or maybe the reason how a team of over 400,000 was able to achieve what most thought was impossible is that they were all simply too young and inexperienced to know it wasn’t possible. The average age in mission control was 28. Just kids. Can someone remind me again which generation seems to be doing the running in dealing with the climate crisis again? Funny that.

The run up to Apollo 8 ‘s flight had been dogged by setback and tragedy. In April 1968 the Saturn V rocket still wasn’t working. Not just a little bit not working, the last test flight before it would be used for the manned Apollo 8 mission saw all 3 of the 3 stages that the rocket would use to get into space fail in one way or another. Despite this, with the deadline of putting boots on the moon by the end of the decade fast approaching, it was decided that something big needed to be done and something big would be to send a mission round the moon in a few months’ time, way ahead of schedule, way ahead of when people thought they would be ready.

Astronaut Bill Anders was asked by his wife what he thought the chances of success were. His reply: one in three that the mission worked, one in three they at least made it back to earth, one in three they didn’t manage that. Which isn’t great odds really, but still, on 21st December 1968 he said goodbye to his wife and headed to Kennedy Space Centre none the less.

Obviously he wasn’t alone. The crew of three, Frank F. Borman II, James A. Lovell Jr. and William A. Anders, should be as well known as Gagarin or Armstrong, Aldrin and Lightyear and definitely better known than Columbus.

Their journey might not have the first man in space, nor first on the moon titles, but the mission was there to prove it could be done. Think of it as the first time a couple visits Ikea. Sure the mission is only to get to the cafe and eat a Daim cake then return home without an argument, but the trip proves it should be possible to buy a full Billy storage system when they return next.

And it’s Michael Collins, not Buzz Lightyear.

There were computers in ‘68, they just weren’t very good.

More accurately, they just weren’t very good compared to what we have now. Unlike the people, who very much were very good compared to what we have now. It’s about a ¼ million miles from earth to the moon. To change direction in space you need to invoke Newtons third law; every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and fire a rocket a bit. Obviously every time you fire yon rocket, you use fuel, and fuel is heavy, and heavy is your enemy when trying to leave earth’s orbit, so you need to carry as little fuel as possible, so you need to make as few corrections as possible. Imagine a straight road a mile long and trying to line your bike up to go straight without corrections for the entire length of the road. Now try that for a distance two hundred and fifty thousand times greater.

Not only that, the only way to make the trip was to use the gravitational forces of both the earth and the moon to slingshot the craft around the moon. All these forces, influences, vectors had to be calculated to allow the astronauts had to arrive at the moon at exactly the right angle; too steep and the moon’s gravity would pull them in and there wouldn’t be enough power in the rockets to prevent them hitting the surface (everyone onboard talked of their desire to have been the first crew to land on the moon, but presumably they all wanted to be the first crew to take off from it again and all) whilst arriving at too oblique an angle and they’d just bounce off the atmosphere and skip off into space.

Forever.

So they kinda had to get it right.

These calculations were all done by hand, well brain really, with the added stress that computer simulations really weren’t what they are now, so finding out if you’d got the numbers right wasn’t theory. Finding out if the numbers right would be if Apollo 8 came back after it went round the dark side of the moon.

Being behind a big lump of rock meant there was no signal with earth. Those onboard would be alone, looking at a side of the moon never seen by human eyes, and with only a rudimentary onboard navigation computer and a sextant for taking course readings from the stars out the capsule window to know if they’d got it right. Those in mission control would be completely in the dark. And you thought the phone signal blackspot in the Argentiere basin made it feel a bit remote. Imagine sitting in mission control, with no radio contact, no communication at all, just waiting and watching the countdown clock for the estimated point signal would return as they came back round.

And waiting.

And still waiting.

And then signal.

The numbers were pretty much bang on and Apollo 8 was orbiting 100km above the surface of the moon. To mark this momentous occasion the first message to mission control went “Ok Houston, the moon is essentially grey”.

Stirring stuff.

Then, on the way to the fourth orbit, Bill Anders took one of the most famous photos of all time; Earthrise.

Listen to the radio recording, the awe in the astronauts voices as the earth comes up into view is palpable, the vision of the brilliant blue spec, this tiny planet, in the vastness of space. How alone it is. “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth” said Bill later. Which I guess mibbies shows that the whole Apollo project was just a very expensive way of proving what every Pixar movie since ever has told us. That the answer always lies within…

Eleven weeks ago I didn’t go to the moon. I didn’t risk my life, I definitely didn’t take any great photos, I didn’t need to tell my wife I had a one in three chance I might die. But I did try a big journey that I really wasn’t sure if I could do, and went round the dark side of Mont Blanc and back. Having been round, over and under Mont Blanc umpteen ways, I’ve wanted to try a day version of the Tour du Mont Blanc for a while now. I’ve also not really felt particularly fit after injuring my knee in the winter and, liking the comfort of knowing I’m strong enough for any day in the guiding season to take away some of the anxiety that I’m not good enough, giving the ride a go seemed a good way to either kill two birds with one stone. Or fail spectacularly and go back to rehab. It would be very boring to tell you about it, so I won’t, but I’m glad I did the ride and learnt a lot* plus hopefully it gives me confidence to leave my comfort zone again sometime.

It might not have been seeing the entirety of the earth in a whole new light, but I did get to see the Mont Blanc massif in new way. Specifically, in a very dry way. After a low tide winter and one of the earliest heatwaves on record, the mountains look parched in a way I’ve never seen before. Actually, in a way no one’s seen before, unless Methuselah walks amongst us, as it seems we’re in the worst drought in 500 years.

And this could be a chance to complain and throw hands in the air and say something needs to be done by someone. And we should, near ¾ of global CO2 emissions are courtesy of only 100 corporations. In fact, your top 3 are Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco), Chevron and Gazprom OAO. But we don’t need to just do that. If you stop eating beef once a week you’ll save about 350kg CO2 a year, which is roughly 0.1% of fuck all in the face of an estimated annual 23.5 thousand kilotons of CO2 from the U.S. military. Individual actions don’t really work, do they…? We’re near enough 8 billion individuals strong on earth. Imagine if we all did a little bit, if we all made some little changes, imagine the power we’d have then. The answer lies within, have you never seen Toy Story?

*So one thing I learnt was that I’ve been pissing about with shit bike lights for too long. A friend hooked me up with some moonlight mountain gear lights, the bright light is laughably, ridiculously, bright. So I took the tiny wee light, and instead delighted in blinding any oncoming traffic that wouldn’t dip their headlights by giving them a burst of the full power 😆