Chamonix Bike Blog

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Encore une fois, Lift openings 2015

It’s great that bikes have pedals for, like, pedalling and stuff, but we’d rather sit on our arses and let something else do the work. Preferably whilst belching CO2, cos that’s more like a 2 stroke crosser, and we all just wish we could ride motocross don’t we.

So, opening dates for Chamonix lifts, and the surrounding area. Boom, voila and here you go (and a bit of music to listen to whilst you read):

Chamonix (usual CdMB caveats apply)

Bellevue: 13^th June – 27th September

Le Tour: 13^th June – 20th September

Flegere: 13^th June – 20th September

Brevent/Planpraz: 13^th June – 20th September

Tramway du Mont Blanc: 13^th June – 27th September

Prarion: 20^th June – 20th September

Grand Montets: 27^th June – 13th September

Vallorcine: 27^th June – 23rd August

And some 1hr distant roadtrippin’ options

La Thuile: 27th June – 30th August http://www.lathuile.it/datapage.asp?id=223&l=1&s=E

Portes du Mont-Blanc: Not up yet, but probably 27th June – 6th September http://www.combloux.com/en/activities/summer/mountain/lifts.html?obt=sitraLOI455581#detailsobt

Tignes/Val d’Isere: More than 1hr, but still free, 27th June – 30th August http://www.tignes.net/en/summer-sports/free-and-a-la-carte-activities-252.html

Grand Massif: Not up yet but probably 4th July – 30th August http://ete.grand-massif.com/les-tarifs

Pila: Not up yet, but probably 20th June – 6th September http://www.pila.it/en/pila/estate/stagione-estiva/

Portes du Soleil: Mostly 26th June – 30th August but some earlier and later http://en.portesdusoleil.com/summer-lifts.html

Verbier: All weekends in June then 29th June – 25th October http://www.verbierbikepark.ch/horaires_fr.php

20/04/2015
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
A night at the opera

The fat lady is singing and Chamonix Bike Blog is getting put to bed for the winter.

Granted it’s still not proper winter in the valley, but it’s near enough so the bike’s been cleaned and put away for a while. Words and pictures will probably start to re-appear February or March(ish) with some sunny warm dusty trail riding. Or mud. Check out Lorne Cameron ski blog if you want to see what most of the fictional characters on here get up to during the winter.

Merry christmas, bonne fete, happy hogmanay and aa that.

11/12/2014
The last big weekend of the summer

End of summer? Ok so it might be the end of meteorological autumn, but outside it’s double digit temperatures, with a warm drying wind rolling over from the south, so for us lot, it feels more like the end of summer.

And what do we do in summer? Ride bikes.

The Loriaz chalet loop is one of the first of the higher trails we ride each year, it’s altitude and aspect ensuring snow free trails that bit sooner than other points around the valley. That and the only way up is under your own steam, so there’s no point putting it off ’till the lifts turn or the road officially opens for some lazy shuttling.

If it comes into condition early in the spring for riding, it also comes into ski touring condition early in the winter so it was a bit of a novelty to be spinning up the fire road on the last days of November for a lap of one of the more varied descents about here.

There’s still a bit of snow near the top, but nothing that needed anything more than stopping to throw snowballs at Sandy. With no real fresh snow on the horizon for below 2000m then if you’ve never ridden the trail (and you’ve not quit biking to drink/ski all winter) g’wan get yourself up there.

Spence and I have ridden the trail umpteen times over the years, but this was Sandy’s virgin ride. It’s always good to show a new trail to someone, keeps the stoke high. Not that that’s hard on the Loriaz descent. There genuinely is a bit of everything on the way down, from the Chamonix staples of hairpins, death exposure and techy steep rocks and roots to the lesser seen open corners, bends of between 10 and 120 degrees, open singletrack, deciduous trees, leaves. Grand.

Another bonus was “orange pow”. A thick layer of pine needles coating sections of the trail which both encouraged drifting like another BC bro edit and leaving a trace of where you went (or went wrong….) for the rider behind you.

Eventually though all good things come to an end and so 750m below the top we get spat out into Vallorcine for the spin back home.

Last big ride of the summer? No idea, the title was really just an excuse to put a link to the best thing to come out of Falkirk since the Romans.

30/11/2014
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

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.

23/11/2014