Abhorred monster.

Posted on 30th September 2018

Autumn. Winter is coming, and other cultural references for stuff I've not seen.

Kids today, eh. Don’t know they’re born, eh. Handed to them on a plate, eh. Am I right eh? Am I right eh*!

So continues a theme that seems to have run since Greek times of when not complaining that the world’s about to end (turns out every era’s been sure theirs will be the last, so we’re not that special after all) the elders have whined that it was all much harder back in their day and that today’s adults of tomorrow are feckless, lazy and dim.

Todays youth. Feckless and lazy, when not starting new companies, creating wealth, etc.

Thing is, sometimes they’re right. When I was 18 I was just about able to be mediocre at racing bikes downhills, skiing on a mud/heather based snow substitute and turning up for lectures. Paying attention at lectures was beyond me.

At 18, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.

I've not really matured much from 18. Skidz n wheelies for the win.

If you’ve not read Frankenstein, you might not be aware how mental that is. Frankenstein is not the jokey, hammer house of horror, novel some of the films suggest. It is page after page of misery and terror that finds new ways to shock you every chapter. Whenever you think the depths have reached a peak (I’d criticise the book for some of the writing, but people in glass houses and all that…), Mary Shelley would find another place to go and scare you more.

It’s not only an imaginative tour de force, her 1818** grasp of science and which of the competing theories available at the time would turn out to tally with 21st century thinking was remarkably prescient. Frankenstein is arguably the dawn of science fiction.

Climate change. #fake news.

As well as being multi-talentless at education and sport, 18 year old me wasn’t exactly great at relationships. Mary Shelley on the other hand was hanging out with Lord Byron whilst being Percy Shelley’s lover. Frankenstein was written holidaying with them both on Lake Geneve, enjoying all night discussion and not going outside much  (due mostly to a volcanic eruption the previous year that had resulted in the world getting a year without summer and the beach not being a great choice).

After a fun night round the fire reading German ghost stories in French (bloody european elitists, get back here and read the Daily Mail you turncoats) Byron suggested they all retire to write a short ghost story each. A couple days later, Byron had invented the Twilight franchise,  Percy probably got some notes down about vegetarianism and atheism (bit ahead of his time that lad) and Mary had the beginnings of Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus.

We'll be skiing there soon. It's covered in snow already, a day after this photo....

 

Anyways (new drinking game, every time you read “anyways” on this blog, have a beer. Please binge drink responsibly) I seem to be veering far, far away from bikes again.

Or am I?

Yay, bikes. Stick to the script Graham, no one's interested in culture and thinking. We'll have beer and sport for the masses. 'Mon the proles.

For the creature, monster, protagonist, wretched devil or hero (choose one accordingly on how you feel about a nameless animated cadaver) went through an awkward few months/years where he didn’t really want to speak to anyone (adolescence is hard to pin down when you’re conceived as a full grown adult) and felt that the best place he could hide out and get away from it all was…..Montenvers, Chamonix.

Which of these would seem more out of this world in 1818, the bike (patented 1817) or the train (first public railway 1803)?

Obviously 200 years ago there wasn’t a train, so he didn’t have to deal with hoards of day trippers, but even now if he’d hung about to the evening he’d have found that the crowds disperse nicely and the trails are pretty quiet.

Two centuries ago the bike was a 1 year old patent so he didn’t have to worry about two wheeled peletons disturbing the peace either, but it’s about a 1hr pedal up to the buvette and another 45mins or more on top of that carry to Montenvers so the effort required limits numbers too. Until recently.

Light bro. We might have been too late for the glacier money shot, but the woods were in fine form. As was the trail.

As Frankenstein’s creation was a marvel of science that the world wasn’t ready for, I see no parallel at all with the Chamonix communes decision to make the trail up to the Mottets buvette an official e-bike route.

A creation, formed between the dissecting room and the slaughter-house, made from the discarded parts of others. From a distance the silhouette is the same yet up close the hideous differences, the rough joining, are all too apparent. More powerful and capable than its natural predecessors and yet shunned and ostracised for being not pure, subsequently lacking identity and being unsure where it should exist in the world, or if it should even exist at all.

No parallels.

Parallel or converging? It's all down to perspective.

Still, the trail’s good, no controversy there. The Caillet trail’s featured in the blog before, but I felt it was time to take an evening spin with the camera, make some pretty pictures to go with all this and encourage folk to maybe give the full descent a go occasionally instead of just sticking with the classic Caillet.

Climbing to Montenvers. Easier without a bike but could be a lot worse. Tim also does hair modelling btw.

You can climb to the Mottets buvette then carry through the boulders to Montenvers, which does mean you get to play on the moonscape of rock up by the end of the 4×4 trail, but it’s harder going after that point. Alternatively take the normal route to Caillet then turn uphill and keep going till you hit the top, or till the light starts to run out and you need to turn round and head home, confusing a wedding party along the way (though that might just have been on our visit).

Whichever way you do it, you’ll be treated to a fine old descent.

Autumn evening rides are flippin' ace.

Well, I say a fine old descent. It goes down hill, the path dates from before the building of the railway which opened in 1909 so counts as old, and we rode all but a 10 meter section of the trail. That adds up to fine in my book, but it is a bit rocks and tech in places, so if you’re not a fan of either of those you’re probably not going to have a great time of it.

Wedding party dodged, we descend back to Montenvers. Tim displaying fine 'Ash-arms' photo technique here.

If you’ve not read Frankenstein I’m not going to ruin it for you by telling you how it ends. Mibbies they all hug it out and ride away hand in hand on unicorns towards a rainbow, mibbies the pit of misery gets mined so deep they’re finally consumed by the molten core of the earth. It’s not much effort for you to find out, and when you do, have a think about how it applies to e-bikes. Then stop thinking about that because it doesn’t matter and have a think about what it says about humanity, which does.

Encore une fois, Chamonix: does good backdrop.

*I’ve been re-watching Spaced recently. In the DVD (which I can’t watch because DVD’s aren’t the future anymore) there was a handy “homage-o-meter” feature which would click up with the homage being homaged on screen at that moment. At some point I will write one of these blogs and flag up the same. This blog is not that blog however.

**The timeline gets a bit blurred for the sake of an easy post here. Frankenstein was conceived of and mostly written in 1816 & 1817, first published anonymously in 1818, published under Mary Shelley’s name in 1822*** and remixed by Mary Shelley for the most widely read version published in 1831.

***Obviously at this point the critical reception of the book changed tone a touch: “The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment” The British Critic.

Tim's moving on from Chamonix. He'll be back, but'll be missed none the less. Good new content he's away to but.

Posted in Chamonix ride , tagged ,

The Ignoramus.

Posted on 16th September 2018

 

Not at all staged officer. Trail building Chamonix style.

I’ve spent most of my life thinking this was an insult, one I’ve received and sent. Turns out it’s a compliment. Or at least, was a compliment.

Ignoramus from the Latin “we do not know”. As in, we don’t know everything so we need to learn. More importantly, that what we do know might not be correct and needs to be constantly reassessed with each new bit of information we receive. Or basically the foundations of modern science and critical thinking and what the whole shoogly enterprise of the twenty first century technological world is based on. How we arrived at Space-X, Man on the Moon, nuclear weapons and the hydraulic dropper post. And why Donald Rumsfeld truly was an ignoramus when he said “there’s things we know we know…”

We do know that there's a trail here. We don't know for how much longer.

Of course, there’s a difference between the enthusiasm to embrace the unknown as a catalyst for learning more about what you don’t know and shrinking your view to the point that everything you don’t know is ignored and you just focus on the area you think you’ve got down (until new knowledge arrives and it turns out the world IS flat after all. Or that ignoramus is a compliment) I’m not sure exactly what it says that populist politics has brought us to a point where many influential persons in the world have a less liberal, less intellectual outlook that the Romans, but the broad brush of it isn’t very uplifting.

Anyways, this reveling in the things we do not know is what’s been sending us to try the next line over for the last few years. The trail we found last week was good, will the trail a little further along be better? Often no, no it’s not. Sometimes it is considerably worse and we emerge from the undergrowth several hours later, bleeding profusely from thorn scarred shins, with grooves on our shoulder from carrying the bikes for 80% of the descent.

Les Arandellys descent. One of my first Chamonix forays into following a little used trail on a bike. Still fairly wild and unused.

But all that just makes the sweet trails taste all the sweeter. No, really. Science says so. A study in 1971 found that pigeons which were trained to peck a button to be given food would do it more enthusiastically when they didn’t know if it was going to work out with a tasty treat. It’s the rewards that ain’t guaranteed that seem to do it for mammals and mamils alike.

Tim is not a pigeon. He does keep trying wheelies though, even if he's no sure they'll always work, because sometimes he gets rewarded. This one worked, somewhere in the back of Les Houches.

The search for new trails isn’t blind though. Just as science draws on the discoveries of the past to leap forward, we let others do as much of the hard work as we can before taking the last step and claiming the glory. If you want to find the next greatest trail ever, have a look through old maps and see what farmers tracks and mining routes have fallen into disrepair and dropped off the radar. Or just look for the bits where people tend not to go with bikes and see where the terrain then matches up with bike friendly angles.

Gabou finding out just how good Chamonix trails can be and that Les Houches does flowy and loamy as well as steep and gnar. Chamonix wouldn't be Chamonix without a bit of pente raid after all...

I’m not the only person to be rocking the ‘look at the clues and use what you’ve found’ technique. Ash ‘Trans Provence’ Smith (to pigeon hole him far more than he should be) and his itinerology series show this ways better than I manage, and the TP race showcases the results of his searching ways ways better too. But, just because you canny run 100m like Bolt doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run.

Ross and Sam visited Chamonix. They had to learn nose turns... Somewhere on a trail Spence and I reclaimed a long while ago on the way to St Gervais.

Following last years trip to Whistler, I returned to Chamonix full of enthusiasm to bring that trail building culture here and create some #sickgnarshreadbroloamfestflow trails. Very quickly I realised I had neither the time, talent, brawn, materials nor dirt to do this. What I DID have however, was a promising looking worn line going off into the trees near the end of a load of great descents in Les Houches, where you had to start using the tarmac to get down to the road….

A bit of scoping later revealed an old walking trail heading down through the woods between Les Houches and Vaudagne. And quite a few fallen trees. And enough shrubbery to keep the Knights of Ni happy. And some of the best rideable rock slabs in the valley.

Bike: Check. Shovel: Check. Ice axe: Check. What? Trail building in Chamonix, you use what you got.

I’d be lying if I said I then invested hour upon hour of my time into carefully clearing and crafting a new trail, but there’s been a few pissing wet afternoons spent in full waterproofs cutting back undergrowth to reclaim the old trail and drier days spent running the line in and tweeking the alignment. All so I can present to you a trail called…

Squam-ish

Because it’s just like all the amazing trail building work in Squamish. Ish.

This is not Squam(ish), or Squamish. It's Spence on Chair-wood, or Sherwood. The name seems to float about a bit, but the sign at the start says Chair-wood and it's a new official bikepark trail at Les Houches and is sweet. as. bro.

Take your choice of trail at Les Houches to end near the Ecole Physic. About 200m BEFORE you reach the tarmac’d Ecole road there’s a 90 degree right bend. At that bend the entrance to Squam-ish is up and a little to the left. I’ve deliberately left the first few meters quite overgrown to minimise the chance of conflict with other users. The trail is fairly flat for the first wee bit, then on an easy rock slab rolling to the right, the interest starts. If I’m honest the trail still needs a fair bit of running in and some substantial work to the last 100 meters or so before it becomes a classic, but the start’s there and if anyone with more time on their hands than I wants to help it evolve, crack on. Otherwise, it’ll get finished off in late autumn (unless winter comes early or I gain meaningful employment).

It's not just Les Houches, Coupeau's been seeing attention from the trail pixies too.

Other folks have spent less time pontificating and more time digging (the pen may be mightier than the sword, but it’s not got much on a backhoe) and as a result there’s a web of fresh trails starting to spread around the valley, mostly in the Les Houches/Coupeau area but also Les Bois and Planet.

James railing (loam) ruts on the big bike on one of the many new Les Houches trails.

Focusing on Les Houches, some of these trails use the old bikepark trails from the days when it was under Bellevue, others pick up abandoned trails that we’ve been looking at on the IGN map for years, but never got the traffic to stay clear. Then others, like the new finish to the Alpage Respect bikepark trail under the Prarion lift, are just straight up brand new.

More of them pesky new Les Houches trails. I'll be honest, the best ones aren't photographed here. Partly cos we're having too much fun to stop for shots, mostly because dark woods don't make for good photos. Or at least, not from this photographer.

It’s got to the point where I didn’t ride Les Houches for 3 weeks, came back, and rode brand new trails every lap for an afternoon, there’s that many new things appearing. For the most part they’ve been made in the fine tradition of old school French DH tracks. Raw and steep. Really steep. They’re also often not that weather proof, so heavy traffic in the rain will ruin them, but in the long hot summer we’re still having the loam is just perfect. Almost powder skiing esque.

Queues for a bike lift. In Chamonix. wtfit?

The summer lift season is almost finished at Les Houches now, but it’s going out with a bang. By this weekend the Prarion lift was hoaching with riders from across France and beyond. The long queues might have been a bit irritating, and the way the trails were evolving from one lap to the next entertaining, but it was pretty amazing to feel like Chamonix was an actual bike town for once, a vibe I’ve only felt a few times before in Finale, Whistler or Morzine. I don’t want that to last mind, we can go back to grumpy locals and empty trails for the other 11 months of the year.

Phil being coaxed out of Switzerland and into loamland of the new trails near Charousse.

Most of these new trails are very much unofficial and not mine to advertise, but as the entrances are generally not hidden, all YOU need to do is look and reap the rewards. A couple of these trails will become official trails once finished but until they’re on the map it’s up to the park crew as to how well advertised they get, so again, I’m not telling until next summer when I can use it for a whole new bit of content.

Strong colour coordination game from Lucy, strong trail game from "Secret Squirrel".

It’s not Whistler, it’s not Squamish either, but the bike scene in Chamonix is looking pretty healthy.

Have fun, be an ignoramus and play nice.

Posted in Chamonix ride, Trail conditions , tagged ,

Feel the serenity.

Posted on 27th August 2018

Feel the serenity. And feel small. That's the other thing hills do for you.

Everyone loves a good bit of content. A little creative framing of the background, your best insta-face, appropriate filter, add a witty “zinger” of a caption. Sorted.

Problem is, once you’ve got a few good contents under the belt your start needing to get something a bit……more…..to get the same hit. Like.

Flowers, sporting equipment, in and out of focus objects, blues and greens and a bit of filter to help them along. Instagold. Which I think was a 'coffee' brand in my youth.

Then, quicker than you can re-write some tired broadsheet copy from the last decade, you’re hanging backwards off a large building in Abu Dhabi. Or biking for 2 days to get to a totally improbable descent on your bike. Obviously one of these situations will be more relevant to most of yous.

Which is why last weekend, Toby, Tim and me found ourselves hiding underneath an overhang in a large couloir as raindrops the size of smarties battered down around us.

Back to where we started, or a couple hours in from there at least.

Obviously we didn’t start at this point. We started in Plaine Joux, a bit above Servoz, with a pedal out of the ski area and up towards the Chalets Souay, then up towards the Refuge Moede Anternne, then up towards the Col du Mode Anterne. I say pedal, there was a fair bit of pushing in there. And a bit of carrying. Which kinda started a theme.

Climbing 1000m doesn’t make for great content. Normally the slow pace means you get plenty of little rider/big scenery shots but the weather was treating us to 7/8ths cloud cover. This was grand news for my pasty Scottish skin but kinda hides the Mont Blanc and Chamonix Aiguilles banger backdrop we were hoping for. So we had to speak to each other and just get on with the climb instead.

Too cloudy for climbing shots, fortunately Toby could muster up this one of some scenic traversing.

Once over the col and on with the assorted padding and protection modern biking fashion and injuries dictate the content creation didn’t get much better. The descent from Col d’Anterne down past the Lac d’Anterne is normally framed by the massive limestone cliffs of the Fiz on one side and the rolling Scottish (slash Lake District slash Kiwi, the problems of going biking with foreigners) hills on the other. When we got there, it was framed by cloud. Not to worry, the trail is just as good irrespective of whether it’s bathed in sunshine or if the weather’s gone for an early bath. It’s also entertainingly unpredictable, with multiple line choices and several moments where what looks benign trail suddenly turns quite engaging.

To infinity....and beyond! Or oblivion. It might be oblivion over that edge.

So far so good, but so known. The ride to here had already been done, dusted and put online, at which point Jamie Carr had pointed out to me that there was a better descent than the line we’d ridden down to the Refuge d’Anterne Alfred Wills. Which is why we turned right just after the Lac d’Anterne towards the catchily titled “Le Petite Col ou Bas du Col d’Anterne” and into Terra Nova. Well, nova for us. The worn path on the ground and fact there was a sign pointing where to go makes it about as undiscovered as America or Australia was. Meh, we’re white and male and we’re claiming it as ours.

Toby being the small biker in big scenery. As Toby is 6 foot 7 and riding an XL Mega, you get a good idea of the size of the big scenery.

Turns out that as one of the original UK alps mountain bike guides, previously a world champs racer and currently a long time resident of the Grand Massif, Mr Carr does indeed know his good descents. After the scenic traverse towards the savage west face of Mt Buet the descent drops into a Mordor esque cirque. The deep greens around us start to blur as the trail eggs you on to ride quicker and quicker. It’s not a difficult trail but it’s plenty fun. As it’s worn into the hillside you’ve almost always got some form of support on the outside of each curve and the drainage ditches have mellow walls that let you manual, hop or bounce over and out as you feel like. And, as the gradient never gets too steep, you get massive value out of the 700m you descend to the hut.

Tim heads for the hut. Quickly. No one want to be an orc snack.

The hut, Refuge des Fonts. Overnighting is a sure fire way to up the value of your content from a trip. Doesn’t matter if it’s climbing, skiing, kayaking or biking. Stay overnight, fire some shots of chillaxing at the end of a long day onto your socials, mibbies add a couple of star studded sky images or a long exposure of headtorches and you’re golden. Except there was no 4g. Oh, the humanity. There was beer though. We ordered some beers and chatted to each other. Again.

Some good beer content that....

There’s not much to say about staying in refuges. Either it’s something you enjoy or you don’t. The food is hearty unless you don’t eat meat and vegetables and cheese. The beds are comfy as long as you’re not over six foot tall (and to be fair, the beds are still comfy, it’s just you can’t stand up in the dorms). The breakfast will be coffee, stale bread and jam. Someone will snore (apparently it was me).

Would sir prefer the en-suite with shower or bath?

They’re also infinitely better than riding with a tent, sleeping bag, stove and food strapped to your bike. The Refuge des Fonts ticked all these boxes, everyone was super friendly, our bikes got locked away in the store shed and we got to stay warm and dry through the overnight rain and wake to blue skies and sunshine.

Refuge des Fonts. Poos with Views.

Day two started as it was intended to finish. Going downhill. Rolling out of the refuge grounds the trail is just about 4×4 truck friendly with some surprisingly well placed banks to make things more interesting. After a few kilometers of that we got to break off left into some sweet singletrack through the trees. In the morning. After a overnight rain storm.

Wet root gardens are a much better wake up shot than any cup of coffee I’ve ever had. We all survived somehow.

It all seemed so easy at this point.

Whilst the day would start and end descending, there was this middle bit where we would go uphill. It started easy enough with a nice meandering road climb up to Le Liggon. It then eased us into some rougher fireroad but still something you’d get a Rangerover up.

A little steeper.

A little narrower.

A little rougher.

Are we having fun yet?

It’s like a good book or movie. The protagonist slowly gets deeper and deeper into trouble but, like the proverbial frog being slowly boiled, doesn’t notice it until they see the side salad getting prepared for their “tastes like chicken” flesh to be served with.

The bikes went onto our backs and we kept going uphill.

Torrent de Sales. Good distraction that.

Fortunately we had the distractions of the Torrent de Sales and its waterfalls as we went up.

And, with good scenery comes the potential for good content, so we got to stop every so often, stretch out the shoulders, and take some photos. Woop.

Sometimes we even got to ride the bikes uphill.

Eventually, and after a pretty brutal 800m and 2hr of climbing, we rolled into the Refuge des Sales. It didn’t take much convincing for us to stop for refreshments. I’m not sure it even took any discussion.

If that menu's blowing away, you probably don't want to eat outside anyways. Refuge des Sales

With only 500m of up left you’d think things would be looking good from here. You’d think, but you’d be wrong. We were entering the Desert de Plate, one of France’s largest limestone karsts and home to some impressively big fissures (and you thought it was an option on the Refuge des Sales’ menu….). When the nearby Flaine ski area opened in 1970’s skiers were quick to exploit the off piste potential of the desert du plate, and promptly started disappearing into stone crevasses covered by thin snow bridges. It also doesn’t make for particularly direct trails.

Still going up.

Never mind, every pedal stroke (or footstep), is another stride in the right direction. Eventually we reached the Col de la Portette and could start looking at the down rather than the up.

All downhill from here Toby....

Looking down had it’s advantages too, the trail from the top of the Col de la Portette isn’t really the kinda thing you just drop into. Not if you want to get beyond the first switchback at least. None of us rode the first switchback.

Tim. Dropping. Or whatever the kids say these days.

Nevermind, a couple switchbacks out of a near 1800m descent isn’t much to stress over. We continued down, and down, and down until we got to the Chalets de Plate. Where it started to spit with rain.

Switchbacks we could deal with.

Up till now the weather had been pretty nice and the forecast had promised that it would stay so.

Unfortunately the weather hadn’t read that forecast.

Strong pointing game from Toby. Strong background game from Sallanches.

Fortunately it seemed to be listening to those of us on the ground complaining and no sooner had it started raining it stopped and the ground began to dry again.

Buoyed with the excitement of it now being downhill all the way to the bar we traversed the short plateau to the main event of the day, the passage through the cliffs of Les Egratz.

TIm passaging as the trail gains interest.

Good content, as implied at the start of this, needs to be a bit eye catching. What could be more eye catching than some big views of a big drop and a wee trail scratching it’s way through it?

Cautiously, because you really didn’t want to fuck things up here, we started to descend….

Now THIS is where it gets interesting.

Then it started to rain again.

Some geology deals well with the rain, a bit of moisture hardly dents the friction available. Squamish granite and Skye gabbro are two examples that come to mind. Limestone is not one of these materials. Limestone does not shrug off moisture and keep its mu. Limestone plus water equals a very unpleasant time for all. Limestone plus water plus death exposure equals not a massive amount of riding getting done.

Ask yourself. Do you want to be here when it starts to rain bigly?

There was a wee bit of debate as to how best to proceed when instead the environment made the choice for us. The rain turned to a deluge, drops of water the size of smarties pummeled us from above and we found ourselves right back where we started this story.

A loose, steep couloir is NOT the place to hang about in weather like this so, being all too aware of many events in the alps this season, we got down as fast as we could and hid under an overhang at the exit from the couloir.

When obviously it stopped raining.

Out of the frying pan, into a nice pool of cool soothing liquid. Things were much better once escaped from the couloir and weather.

I’ll not lie. We were all a bit disappointed by this turn of events (the rain, not the stopping of the rain). Two days is a fairly long approach in bike terms for a descent. It’s about the journey not the destination and all that though. We’d already had a wheen of good riding, missing out on less than 100 meters of vert didn’t change that, nor did it change that we still had a little over a vertical kilometer to drop yet. Dry your eyes mate, get back on the bike and start having fun.

Both riders in the air at the same time, on a natural trail. Rare as unicorn poo that. Rare trail too...

From a story telling content perspective, I’d finish this post there, stepping out from the overhang, shot of three riders laughing and shrugging shoulders, then cuttying and manualling off into the sunset.

From a real life perspective, we continued more sheepishly. There were a few navigational issues on the descent, it turns out that if only one of the members of the team has ridden the trail, and only once, and that once was part of a longer ride where he was not on an e-bike whilst the others were, and it was in the evening, and it was 4 months ago, his memory might not be perfect for each junction……we got there in the end, and it was worth the detours. A trail destined for another visit for sure.

That's some of your genuine loam there lad, no fakes, no imitations.

We reached the bar, the traditional end point for all rides and start point for the creation of the story of the ride. As none of us had go-pros we skipped high fives and went straight to ordering beers. What did we learn? Nothing we didn’t know already*.

Refuge des Fonts. It's not all fun and games, we found a hidden mine relying completely on child labour there too. Dark things happen in them thar hills.

*An abrupt end for sure. I considered padding out the “living life in the moment” analogy even further, but there’s more than enough words in this already, and the irony about spending current time by writing of a past event as a parable to live in the moment is getting too much for me.

Posted in Chamonix ride , tagged , , , ,

All the lifts.

Posted on 17th August 2018

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, a day on the lifts starts with a chilly uplift. deep innit.

In 2013 Lorne and I tried to ride every lift on the Chamonix pass in a day. We failed because we didn’t really think it through first. You can read all about it on the blog here.

In 2016 Lorne and I tried to ride every lift on the Chamonix pass in a day. We failed because we were a bit ambitious about how quick we’d move at the end of the day. You can read all about it on Pinkbike here.

In 2018 Lorne and I tried to ride every lift on the Chamonix pass* in a day. We…..

Photos were mostly taken with the mind, not the camera, so there's a ration on pictures of us riding the bikes. I'm using the ration carefully.

Well, where would the suspense be if you knew the outcome was by the 3rd paragraph? OK, it would be in the well written prose where it’s a literary technique called prolepsis, but here you’re lucky if I dinnay stray into Scots too often, so you can just have good old fashioned chronological prose instead. (play literary technique bingo HERE with the hand guide to words you’ll never remember)

Number 1 of a series I call "photos from, in or of lifts". Kevin Carter is not amused.

In past attempts there were pages of maps and detailed spreadsheets of timings. For this go it was as much as either of us could do to find a date neither of us were working. Date found, we met for the 0754 train outta Chamonix with a scribbled list of lift closure times and worked it out on the way.

On the way from Vallorcine to Le Tour. Chamonix. Does good backdrop.

Pedal up to Le Tour, wait for the lifts to open, go up the lifts, ride round to the Vallorcine DH. Its been well hammered by some recent storms, the “black” grading probably needs shaded in even harder. It’s quite the warm up lap.

There was some good light today. bro.

Up the Vallorcine gondola, pedal up to the Col Posettes, head down through the bike park. It’s the July – August bike ban so the more interesting ways down are all out of bounds. Obviously, being the smoothest and easiest trail of the day, I get a puncture on the green track.

Number 2 of the series. Prarion. You're going to see a lot of these photos so you'd better get used to it.

Grands Montets, Flegere and Brevent are all closed to bikes this summer (well, Brevent isn’t, but you can only go up from 1615 and there’s just 1 way down, so we’re treating it as closed) so it’s a fast pedal through the valley to Les Houches and Prarion.

This is the new entrance to the Les Houches DH track. I like the backdrop...

Prarion lift, Prarion DH trail. There’s a new see-saw to enter the track (we don’t like see-saws) the trails running pretty good, and the new finish spits you out just above the Bellevue lift.

Number 7 in the series. What, you think I've jumped a few? Interesting, you think in THAT time order. Humans eh.

Puncture excepted, all had gone smoothly up to now. There was a gondola sitting ready to leave. We weren’t allowed on it and had to wait for the next lift. I bought a baguette. You make the most of downtime on days like these.

Number 3 of the series. Bellevue lift before the hundreds of pedestrians got added.

There’s a grand yet little known trail starting a few hundred meter down from the Bellevue lift that drops you down towards La Chapiot. We took this trail for those reasons, it really is grand and being little known it wasn’t hoaching. It also handily puts you onto the trail round to Pont des Places and Le Champel and cuts out a wheen of road and climbing on the way to Les Contamines.

One of those rationed riding photos, off the back of Col du Voza and en route to Les Contamines.

A handy feature of many of the lifts outside the Chamonix valley is they either close for lunch or run on 30 minute rotations. Or both. The Les Contamines lift closes from 1230 to 1345. With some smugness we were on the lift by 1200. As the next lift was also closed ’til 1345 we chose to do a bigger lap off the top. Well worth the detour. And we could stop and take some photos as we went too. Bonus.

Todays most terrifying lift award goes to......Les Contamines. There's not much holding your bike on there. I had to hold mine into the rails for the ride.

Bollocks. Having sauntered up to the St Gervais lift well before its 1345 opening we get blocked out of the queue for the second stage and made to wait 15 mins for the next rotation. Will we make the last lift in time? Will we rue those missing 15 mins? Will anywhere have ice cream in Megeve? All these questions and more remain to be answered.

There's some right good trails off the top of Les Contamines down towards the roman road past Notre Dam de la Gorge. You should try them!

From the top of St Gervais we’re aiming for the Jaillet lift in Megeve, and strike a fairly direct line towards it down the hill. The trails about here aren’t so easy to find as over in Chamonix, you don’t get as many folks exploring this far. If you can bring yourself to make the effort, then joining the dots between Les Mandarines Restaurant, Bornand, Darbelet and Les Choseaux is well worth your effort, even if forestry work and storms have damaged or destroyed some sections of the trail. About a third of the way down we score the first crash of the day too, with Lorne hitting the deck hard. An enduro crash though, he’s up and riding as soon as he can see the bike is fine.

The shot of the day, but where and when is it taken....?

At the Jaillet lift we find Lorne is a little less fine, but it’s only blood and the body had something like 5 litres of the stuff so he can afford to waste some of it. Jaillet lift is also home to some fine trails, a veritable maze criss crosses its way through the forest below the lift. The best way to learn it is to get a day pass and keep trying different trails. We didn’t have time for that, so Lorne had to trust I could remember where I went in races past.

No photos from around Jaillet, so here's another from the start of our trail at the top of Col du Voza.

It seemed to work, 45 mins after getting off the St Gervais lift we were at the Rochebrune lift and ready to rock. Except the Rochebrune wasn’t running for another 15 mins. That answers that question.

Number 4. Rochebrune lift. The first lift installed in the alps intended for skiers not tourist don't cha know.

Are there any worthwhile trails to ride off the Rochebrune lift? So far the answer there is no, but I’ve not tried every trail, so mibbies there’s something. Eitherways, it’s on the lift pass, takes bikes, and the 4×4 trails help get us over to the next lift with a minimum of pedaling, so it gets taken and ridden.

Oddly, given the pace we were having to keep, no riding shots from here either, so it's #5 in the lift station series instead. Mont d'Arbois, Megeve.

Petite Fontaine. This is more like it. We’re running seriously tight here to get to the next lift by 1630, so there’s no photos only memories (and they don’t convert to 1’s and 0’s well yet), but this lift is way more what folks have in mind when they think of undiscovered alpine chairlifts. Big rolling terrain and sweet rooty singletrack. Over all to soon but with the schedule we’re on, probably soon enough. Or maybe not, we get to our next checkpoint with so much time to spare we can buy ice creams. Another question answered.

Mmm. Ice cream. Well, sugary sorbet would be more accurate, but you can only work with what the cafe stocks.

Mont d’Arbois. Fourth of the poorly named Megeve trilogy, the lift brings you back up to more or less the top of the St Gervais lift. That means it brings you up to the top of the “Wizz” flow trail. In a region of the alps not known for getting flow trails right, this is a wee gem of a trail that could have been lifted straight out of Whistler. Early season Whistler before the braking bumps form up at that. Not sure about the name though.

A wee tease of earlier in the day, that same slower lap off Les Contamines where we could take photos. Tempting you over there at all?

Wizz trail ridden, we’re still 620m above and 16 mins before the last tramway, our last lift, of the day. Whilst it would be nice to do those 620m on some quality singletrack that’s not an option in this area, and even the average singletrack is a bit time consuming, so we crack on with a bit of road riding and cut through finding.

Number 6 in the series, Bellevue top station (next to the Tramway station, so kinda works chronoillogically) I call this piece "self portrait of a bike and its rider"

Two minutes early is as good as 10. Two minutes is enough to buy a can of juice whilst you wait for the Tramway car to appear over the horizon. You learn to make the most of downtime on days like these.

Because when you've already been out of the house for 10 hours, it makes perfect sense to add another few hundred meters of up. Lorne on the way up to Col Mont Lachat.

Arriving at the bike high point of the tramway, Bellevue, it sort of dawns on us that we’ve actually managed to get round all of the lifts. We’re both a bit tired and the cumulative wear and tear of the day is showing. The sensible choice here would be to take the classic GR5 trail down as a victory lap…..but somehow that doesn’t seem quite the fitting way to end. No, to celebrate we decide that we’ve not done enough today and the perfect way down would be to drag our battered bikes and bodies up towards the Col Mont Lachat and ride one of the most technical and consequential trails in the valley.

Arandellys descent. There's quite a lot of it like this.

I’m not sure I could truthfully say the Arandellys descent is the most suitable trail to end this day on, but I guess there were a few parallels to the rest of the ride. You need a certain amount of ambition, confidence and luck to ride it clean. Neither of us rode it clean, but we were both above our average for getting through each section. Amazing what a bit of success does for the riding confidence.

Arandellys. Don't fall right. Or left, 'cos you'll just bounce off the wall and go right.

Another convenient coincidence of this trail, it ends at a pub. So did our ride**

Boom. 5 years after first attempt, and about 123km riding and 2000m climbing later. We get to the pub. Cheers.

*Some caveats. These are all the lifts on the Chamonix Mont Blanc Unlimited annual pass that you are allowed to take a bike on during the bike ban months of July and August. Outwith these months there are more choices in the Chamonix Valley, but then most of the lifts outside the valley are closed. Brevent is the complicated one as after a few years of being closed to bikes in July and August has no opened to bikes, but only after 1615 and only to ride the road down. So we missed it out.

** Well, only figuratively. We then rode home after a couple pints (err, don’t drink and ride kids). As I live in a ground level apartment and Lorne a 3rd floor flat then I assume this is why my strava gives 9819m of descent and Lornes’ 9996m. A fair bit either way. Lorne worked out the numbers on the ride without the lifts and train. 123.4km, 2070m climbing, 9996m descending. Up for it?

Relive ‘Every lift August 2018’

Posted in Chamonix ride , tagged , , , , , , ,

Milestones

Posted on 21st June 2018

Bitta Gaston in a Sheffield / Cham mix.

Summer solstice, The longest day, shortest night and a time for reflecting on being half way through the tropical year and that it’s all downhill from here.

More, my bike is 1 today. Happy birthday bike.

Another fine morning on my way to ride my bike somewhere interesting.

Whilst we’re finding arbitrary dates, the blog is now just over 6 years old. Like bikes over the last six years (or 200, for t’was eighteen hundred and eighteen years when the two wheeled running machine first terrified the good people of London. Presumably the not so good people and all), it’s evolved a fair bit fae those early days too. The photos are of a better quality (and not just because I now mostly nick Lorne and Toby’s good ones) the writing is better. And I’m more jaded and bitter so the information is probably more of a sandbag delivered with more a witheringly sarcastic voice. Though, you probably don’t read this in my voice so you’ll escape the worst of that.

Lorne in Pila 2015, one of my better photos.

The blog was started with the lofty aim of trying to show y’all that there was more to Chamonix riding than the handful of honeypotted trails that we can’t ride in the bike ban and to persuade folks to try some of the other riding we’ve got here. Nae idea how much is the blog’s fault, but there’s definitely more tyre tracks appearing on the more esoteric and niche lines about the valley. Who’d a thunk 6 years back that the Les Arandellys trail would get so popular.

For my next mission, stigmatize Strava cut lines. If you canny get your bike round the corner, get better or walk. You disgust me…

Sandy doesn't do strava cut lines, come back Sandy!

Anyways (probably my commonest used paragraph starter) 6 years (and 13 days) for 135 posts, 4 bikes and god knows how many words n pixels later, we’re at the point where this counts for content. Progress eh?

Taking inspiration from that first post (what, you haven’t clicked on the link yet?) here’s a wee round up of where we’re at the now in the valley for bikes:

Le Tour: Currently just the lower gondola and trails, but the Autannes chairlift should be open for bikes next week.

Posettes on opening day. You've got until the end of the month, get it whilst you can...

Grand Montets: Is closed to bikes all of this year as all the trails off, walking or biking, are closed for works. The summer skiing’s no too bad though.

Grands Montets skiing just grand on summer ski season opening day, 16th June.

Les Houches: Bellevue and the Tramway du Mont Blanc for now, Prarion opens at the weekend. Some work’s being done on the official DH trails and they’re closed for now but the other trails are in pretty good nick. And mind the last tramway up the hill is 1510 at the moment…

I was on my own, what exactly do you expect from the photography after 6 years?

Brevent: The Chamonix-Planpraz lift has been open on and off for most of the spring, so the trails are worn in, everything is clear enough and it’s just the usual tech to worry you. The Planpraz – Brevent stage opens this weekend, and it all goes off limits again, as usual, for the July-August bike ban.

Flegere summer 2018. Not a great photo, technically nor literally.

Flegere: Is currently closed to bikes, the apologetic liftie held some hope that this might change at some point, but the lift will be VTT interdite for sure during the July-August bike ban. As for the trails, which you can get to with a wee bit of effort fae Brevent, the 4×4 access road is closed for a pipeline to be installed, the descent to Floria / Les Praz has some trees down on the upper section. Lower down there’s been some work to smooth off the trail a bit but otherwise it’s just as grand and tyre and rim destroying as ever.

Bike by a train. The year round valley uplift.

Bikes then. In six years the blog’s got through two Lapierre Spicys, a Canyon Strive and now this abused beast, the Airdrop Edit. In the last 12 months it’s dropped over 215,000m of descent in France, Italy, Switzerland and Canada, trundling about 3300km in the process. Which gives an average gradient of 6.66%. The number of the beast. Spooky eh.

Oban Cycles roof drop. In hindsight, the trials bike was a better choice for this... Cheers for the photo Gordon

Three times older than this blog is this picture. A teenage me eschewing gas-to-flat with pedalhop-to-uphill. More importantly, I’m on a Kona Stab from back when DH bikes first started to sort themselves out. Before this bike I had an old GT LTS DH, like wot Peaty rode, that rocked a whole 140mm of rear travel, 140mm wheel base and, obviously, snapped (this happens a lot when buying not really fit for purpose products that’ve had a few less than careful owners). That Kona was the first of the generation of bikes that could survive the abuse they were getting. It’s just a shame they weighed so much.

All the good of the Stab, and none of the bad. Cracking shot courtesy of Soren Rickards

The Edit has a lot in common with the Stab. In 1998 the price for the Stab frame and an inline Fox vanilla R coil shock was £1149. The price for the Edit frame with inline Cane Creek coil shock, £1299. 13% inflation over 20 years, they’d be happy with that in Venezuela. And, having made a geometry comparison table between the two bikes, I think I’ve found where that inflation went. The top tube.

Bike Stab 99 Edit 17
Frame Size M L
Head Angle 69 66
Seat angle 72 76
Top Tube 582 640
Chainstay 432 435
Wheel-base 1087 1220
Fork Offset 33 46

There will be some new trail content coming soon here, but I need to finish the trail first, and then there’s some promising looking lines on maps that need followed. And… Basically, bear with it and there’ll be something good to read along at some point. Cheers and here’s to another 215,000m/6 years of gradually rising standards.

 

Posted in Trail conditions , tagged , , , , , ,

Scaphoid stories

Posted on 23rd May 2018

I call this piece "six months of scans piled on the table"

What do Nico Vouilloz, Blenkie, Katy Winton, Cameron Cole, Adam Brayton, Remi Gauvin, Cedric Gracia (and many, many more) have in common?

Yup, they’re faster than you*.

And they’ve all broken their scaphoid(s).

I didn't break anything here, but you get the idea, Toby on the conveniently located camera.

I also have this in common, in amongst my 20+ broken bones from head (left lower orbital) to toe (left 5th phalanges proximales) I can include my scaphoid. I might also be faster than you, but then again, mibbies no.

When I broke my scaphoid I struggled to find good information online relative to biking so there’s a content niche there to exploit, but before that, some caveats:

1) Why are you trying to diagnose and heal your wrist online? Go to a bloody doctor.
2) Stop reading about scaphoid injuries online, all you’re going to find are the bad news stories where there was non union and the hand fell off**, no one puts up the tales of when they broke their wrist, followed medical advice and returned to riding fine a couple months later.
3) I’ve dealt with the Scottish NHS and Haute Savoie medical system. Your mileage may vary.

Caveats done.

The small bolt nicely shows exactly where the scaphoid is. Handy that.

Let’s start at the beginning, what is the scaphoid? The scaphoid, or navicular if you’re American, is one of the carpal bones of the wrist, situated towards the base of the thumb where the radius (the bigger of your 2 arm bones) meets the wrist. If you put your thumb into the hitchhiking thumbs up position, then prod a finger into the triangle made by the tendons of the thumb by the junction with the arm, you’ll probably find your scaphoid. If that’s too hard, the scaphoid is the one with the small bolt in it, image above. The scaphoid is different to the majority of bones in the body in that most of the blood supply comes from the distal (finger) end of the bone then flows through the bone to the proximal (arm) end rather than having equally good connections at either end. It’s the most common bone to fracture of the wrist, and the most common fracture mechanism is a fall to outstretched wrist.

What sort of breaks are there of the scaphoid? Firstly breaks range from tiny wee cracks where the bone is still mostly intact and stable, through to completely severed bones or a ‘displaced fracture’ in medic speak. Tiny wee cracks in a stable fracture is what you want the doctor to say, displaced fracture isn’t. The location of the fracture on the scaphoid is important too. Fractures at the finger and thumb end, or ‘distal pole,’ are better news than in the middle, or ‘waist,’ of the bone. In turn, a fracture at the arm end of the bone, or ‘proximal pole’ is the slowest to heal.

Why is breaking a scaphoid bad? Normally when you break a bone it’s a fairly quick return to the bike, especially for pros who have a far better range of health care, physio and drugs available to help them bounce back. The scaphoid is generally not a quick return, pro or not. When a bone is broken it relies on a good blood supply to bring the assorted materials required for creating the callus and ultimately reuniting the bone. As the scaphoid gets most of its blood from just the one end of the bone, when you split that bone in half it leaves the proximal, or arm, end of the bone poorly provided with blood and hence not getting supplied with all the healing goodness required. To further compound matters, breaking a bone is generally the result of trauma so there’s a good chance the soft tissues of the wrist will be damaged and swollen and the blood supply further constricted.

This is my wrist about 3 hours after the crash. This is not what a wrist should look like and it was about now I was told I was probably going to have wrist permanently fused :-(

How can you tell if your scaphoid is fractured? Easy, you get off google and go to a hospital where they have a range of highly trained professionals and expensive diagnostic machinery. Admittedly even then it can be hard to diagnose immediately due to other trauma so it’s not uncommon for the wrist to be immobilized as a precautionary measure and you telt to come back 5 days or so later when the swelling’s gone down a bit for a better look.

Let’s assume you’re off to the hospital anyway.

If you’ve crashed and landed on your hands, you might have fractured something in your wrist. Pain and stiffness in the wrist is a good indication something’s wrong. Being unable to get your thumb into the hitchhiking position another sign, and pain or loss of strength when trying to pinch something between fingers and thumb is yet more indication. When I broke mine it was fairly easy to tell as I’d put my left arm bones through my wrist, snapping the scaphoid cleanly in half, breaking my ulna and fully dislocating my wrist (I’d also broken some bones in my right arm and wrist, but my attention was kinda focused on my left arm at the time, a good reminder that the bit that hurts might not be the only issue post crash) however friends have broken their scaphoid and not had it diagnosed for up to 6 weeks, in which time they’d kept riding, gone on road trips, ridden some MX… My x-rays also showed I’d previously broken several other bones in my wrists and not known. In summary, if it hurts, go to the fucking hospital.

So you’ve broken your scaphoid, what are the immediate medical options? Well, what country you’re in and what the surgeon’s experience is all have a bearing here, but generally it’s one of two things. For a non displaced wee fracture of the distal end of the scaphoid, then immobilization in a cast for at least 6 weeks is the probable outcome. A fully displaced fracture of the proximal pole will most likely require surgery. A fracture in between these extremes will receive a treatment in between. The younger, healthier and/or more active you are, the more likely it is you get surgery. Surgery is generally ‘internal fixation’ a.k.a. ‘screwing the bone back together’. This is most commonly in the form of a Herbert screw which is headless screw with two different thread pitches that tighten the two halves of the bone together as it’s inserted and gets buried in the bone forever, but other methods exist.

Four months after crash. I'm not saying one pole skiing is a good idea for the wrist, but it's a good idea for the head.

What are the secondary medical options? This is where it gets interesting. The above information is pretty easy to glean from a few hours of scrolling through the internet. Information of how to maximise your chances of getting a quick recovery is harder to find.

Firstly there’s the easy gains. Don’t use the arm. It’s been immobilized for a reason, going biking with your arm in a cast is not going to help matters.

Next, do everything you can to maximize the quantity and quality of the blood supply to the scaphoid. Ultimately it’s the blood that’s going to supply the required materials and remove the waste so you want this to be as good as it can be (a 2015 study where old mice were given blood from young mice showed a huge increase in bone fracture healing speeds, so going full vampire might help older readers…). Hence, avoid alcohol, salt and smoking. Obviously as a Scot my normal evenings activity is to sit on the sofa with a fish supper, a can of Super T and 20 benson and hedges listening to the Proclaimers*** so that had to change.

Getting more marginal in the gains, your diet can make a bit of a difference. Bone healing uses a lot of calories, a major bone fracture might need you to treble your calorie intake. The scaphoid is not a major bone, in fact it’s tiny, so you don’t need a massive increase in food, but you might as well try and improve the quality of what you’re eating to ensure that tenuous wee bugger of a bone joins. Fracture healing is a hugely complex process that’s still not completely understood, but there are assorted minerals and vitamins you can take supplements of that might improve blood supply and healing. Firstly, make sure you are eating enough protein, one of the major building blocks of bones. You don’t need to be drinking milk/steak smoothies, but bean sprouts, broccoli, spinach and the like are all high in protein and full of other useful nutrients. The generally agreed on minerals are calcium, iron and zinc whilst the alphabet of vitamins focuses on A, C, D, E & K. Beyond these there are all manner of articles proposing the myriad benefits of whatever the website happens to be selling.  By all means go for it, but do a bit of research before hand. You should get sufficient of them already from a healthy balanced diet, some supplements might help, some might make you think they’re helping, some might do nothing but some might actually hinder healing and that’s probably best avoided.

A number of anti inflammatory drugs also affect the healing process by inhibiting crucial enzymes, so unless prescribed don’t start necking ibuprofen or the like to try and help. Instead foods high in Omega 3 and Vitamins C & E help with the natural anti inflammatory mechanisms within the body and work to remove the waste products (free radicals, a band, terrorist group or medical term depending on your frame of reference) of the fracture healing process. So a nice kale and spinach salad with lemon dressing then, though the most efficient way to get omega 3 does seem to be from oily fish such as salmon or mackerel.

You might be able to get access to a bone growth stimulator. These emit electromagnetic or low powered ultrasound waves, depending on the device, and some studies have shown improved healing times with their use. Certainly there doesn’t seem to be any negative side effects, so if you have the opportunity it’s probably worth giving it a bash.

It seems an obvious solution that if you want to increase the blood supply to the wrist, you should go and exercise and increase the blood flowing round your body. Simples aye? Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to back this one up, although it’s likely your physio will give you some exercises that might help a little. There are plenty studies that show a considerable link between exercise and mental health however. There are also a number of studies linking mental health and healing rates. The happier you are the quicker you heal, so if the idea of weeks or months away from exercise has got you depressed, then finding some form of activity that won’t risk the delicate joining of the scaphoid but stops you going stir-crazy is probably a good idea.

Five months after fracture and the wrist is strong enough to drink a cup of tea. This is a very important moment for me!

How long is going to be before I can play out on my bike? Healing can take a long time. A very long time. If you’re lucky you can be in a cast for 4 weeks, another couple weeks of rest and you’re back on the bike. Normally it’s more like three plus months away from the bike. Eight months is not uncommon. It took me five months before my surgeon was confident that there was bone union and another 3 months before he was happy enough for me to start “light exercise” of the wrist. 12 months off the bike is still better than never riding again so if that’s what it’s taking to heal then that’s what it’s taking to heal. It’s not what you want to hear but shit happens.

For the first few months of my recovery I would be asking the surgeon roughly how long he thought it would take me to get back on the bike, then if he thought I would get back on the bike. The response centered on the phrase “gros traumatisme” and avoiding answering, however I’ve been told I wouldn’t ski at a high standard again after a leg injury and that I’d not have a working shoulder after 30, so don’t get too disheartened by any lack of enthusiasm for your return to biking. Anyways, after all this you need to start physio to get back on the bike. Listen to your physio and do what they tell you. If you’re not getting the treatment you think you need, change. Go private, whatever.

One of the first rides back after 8 months off the bike. Braces, physio and patient friends are grand!

How do I go biking again? Even once you get the all clear for returning to the bike it’s likely you’re going to need to protect the wrist for the first 12 months, or possibly forever. At first your mobility will be much restricted and the whole arm, wrist and hand will be weaker, even if you’ve done all your physio. There are a variety of wrist braces out there, ranging from the cheap and basic through to massively expensive. Within reason, you get what you pay for. The more expensive braces, particularly those that originate from motocross, allow you to regulate the range of movement you have before they kick in and can help you gradually increase the load the muscles are taking.

I use the Allsportsdynamics IMC/Sport wrist brace which I chose by looking at all the riders listed above that have broken their scaphoids and noticing that they were almost all using variations of that brace. The Mobius brace gets good reviews too. If using the Allsportsdynamics brace then get the glove pockets too as it’s much better than bodging it onto your hand with velcro.

Twenty months after I broke my scaphoid (and ulna and had 3 surgeries to dis-dislocate my wrist) and following lots of help from Janie and the rest of the team at Clinique du Sport in Chamonix, I have about 60% mobility, 75% strength and get all sorts of pain and discomfort during riding. But, with the brace, I can on a good day ride more or less as I used to and I suspect it’s my head rather than my body that’s stopping me from get fully back to where I was. It turns out after enough injuries you start to lose interest in getting hurt again. You might be lucky and don’t need a brace afterwards. I do. It’s better than not riding.

A couple weeks after my crash I was meant to be going to Whistler. 13 months later, I got to go to Whistler. I rode A-Line a bit. It's good to have a target....

This has probably been my longest post ever, and if you’ve managed to read through all that then I wish you all the best with your recovery. What I won’t do is wish you luck, luck has nothing to do with it. Ultimately YOU need to take charge of healing. The A&E team, the orthopedic surgeon, the physio will all try and help you heal, but if you don’t take control of your injury and work with them, look at what they’re doing, ask questions, see how you can heal better, then how do you expect to get back riding quickly? All those riders up there have come back from injury stronger again and again. They don’t do that by ignoring the issue, they do it for the same reasons they are better than you on a bike, because they keep trying, keep working, until they’re sorted.

I'll not lie, missing trips like this because an injury kept me off the bike forever would get me down, but I remind myself that this was so good because I shared it with friends, the bike was just the medium for it. There are other sports, there are other activities, the people are the important part.

Further reading. I canny recommend Dave MacLeod’s ‘Make or Break‘ highly enough. Focused on climbing injuries, but the mechanisms for healing described within are valid across all injuries. Whilst I’m at it, as sporting self help books go, his ‘9 out of 10 climbers…‘ is pretty good reading too.

I’d also recommend having a look at a couple of online articles by injured mountain bikers which will hopefully help put things in perspective, namely Lorraine Truong, Tara Llane and Martyn Ashton

Twenty months later, 95% back. That'll do me.

*Unless you’re Aaron Gwin, in which case, hiya!
** I’ve not read of someone’s hand falling off, though some of the MX injuries ain’t far off.
***There is no medical evidence yet linking the Proclaimers to delayed bone union.

Posted in Interview, Review , tagged ,

Les Arcs: Putting the Fun in Funiculaire

Posted on 29th April 2018

It's going to be so yuge, we will never tire of winning. Ok, maybe we'll get a little tired of winning, but there will be yuge winning. I got Melania a card.

Ah spring. Where the days get warmer, the snow melts away, the skiing day gets shorter and the bike rides get longer.

Then we start moaning about having to pedal up the hill and look about for ways we can cheat and confuse the insulated gore-tex jacket wearing majority by cadging a lift up with them before everything closes until summer season proper. Some instagram based FOMO triggered by Emily Horridge and her shots of riding off the Les Arcs funicular prompted the car getting pointed south to the Savoie…

Where would you rather be, riding this off a lift....or skiing slushy bumps. Hard question that.

In the past I’ve tried to keep the blog kinda semi-relevant to the “Chamonix” bit of the title by writing about spots less than an hour from town. This got a bit stretched when the first Finale entry appeared, and pretty much abandoned when Whistler got tripped to. Still, I’ve driven to Bourg St Maurice in about 90 mins from Chamonix before, so I figured that it’d be fine to include, and also figured that if we were meeting Emily at the lifts at 11, then picking up Lorne and 9 and Toby just after should give us plenty time. Except, we’ve all got new bikes since I last tried putting 3 bikes and 3 bodys inside the car. And today I’m the shortest of the crew, not the tallest. And I forgot cars need fuel to move. And it turns out there’s more traffic during the day than at double espresso in the morning.

Anyways. 1hr late, we were ready to ride the funicular.

Bikes on a train. Bit more modern than the tramway du mont blanc train too.

You canny buy a VTT pass yet (it’s still winter mind) but handily the 19euro pedestrian pass lets you ride the lift all day, which is pretty much all day, 0800 to 2000. Good value that. A couple of minutes and 800m vertical later we step out into Les Arcs 1600 and head to the local trail everyone’s heard of.

Black 8.

Black 8. Lorne dressed appropriately, but forgot to give the bike the memo.

Everyone’s heard of it because it’s really good. You could probably spend a day just starting on the official trail and experimenting with the many variations each lap and not get bored.

The official Black 8 line was reminiscent of some of the Whistler bike park trails. Even when you didn’t know what was coming up, if you were riding at the right “flow” speed for the bit of trail you could launch off pretty much whatever you saw, safe in the knowledge there would be a landing more or less in the right place, a catch berm to steer you in the right direction, and everything would be just fine.

Emily hors-piste on (or off?) black 8

Well, until our last lap, but we’ll come to that later.

Yet more black 8 dustbowl goodness. Can you tell Lorne and I did one more lap? Just to get photos for y'all obviously. We got nowt out of it.

Like I said, you could probably lap the variations of Black 8 all day and leave feeling satisfied with your 19euro investment, but we were riding with locals, so obviously we weren’t going to stick to the marked line….

Heading away from the marked trails on a wee explore. Will you look at that sky! (Orbital, Fluffy Clouds anyone?)

We rode a wheen of trails. I’m not exactly sure which was which, but names getting bandied about as well as Black 8 included Brown Pow, Secret Garden, Secret Secret Garden, Secret Secret Secret Garden (so secret Emily had only ridden S3G for the first time the day before, and was already showing it off to us!) Little Losinj, Schlitten Land, No Brainer.

No idea what this trail was called. "Fun" would be a good name though.

This is a lot of names, which mean very little to anyone who’s not ridden there or is in on the joke, so you’ll just have to either go and explore yourselves to find them all, or give Emily a shout. Though given the number of other trails we were hearing about for the summer when there’s more lift options, you probably won’t ride all of them even then.

Crew! Riding solo's grand and all, but so's having a bunch of you out to share the fun.

One trail does stand out but, the riding if not the name. After a road traverse from the top of the funicular and a brief climb, we’d been descending a fun, if rocky, trail through the edge of the forest and out into the fields for a while. As we got lower, the trail got faster. And faster. With Emily up front and Lorne trying to hold her wheel, I was next in the train to guess at the line through the dust and dodge the flying rocks. You could argue it would make sense for us to have left more space between each other for a clear run, but where would the fun be in that? Rattling along trying to hold pace with each other, yelling encouragement/insults as appropriate, trying to find theinsidelines and kicking up as much dust as you can. Ain’t that what everyone’s inner MTB wean wants to do? Actually you could probably also argue we should have been riding slower and wearing layers of cotton wool, but that’s by the by.

Because dusty berms are fun. (though the aftermath isn't great for camera internals....)

With such quick uplift, and no need to work out where we were going, we kept lapping the trails, 800m drop at a time. We’d stopped for a sandwich and damn fine coffee (no, really, best coffee I’ve had this side of Italy: Pause Coffee) at lunch time, but that was about 5 hours and 4000m ago.

Emily testing if the woodwork survived the winter. There're so many wee lines dotted about the woods under the funiculaire

It was about now that I re-learnt the lesson I seem to have to re-learn every summer. That a full day of riding off the lifts, not eating or drinking enough, and loose terrain generally results in an unexpected encounter with the ground.

I remembered this as, on Black 8, a long root garden knocked me off line and into the air, just where you really should be on the ground and getting composed for a wee off trail kicker. Instead of rolling up the kicker, I landed on the last couple inches of the takeoff, got fired over the bars, and found myself heading headfirst for a large tree stump. Faced with a choice between arriving on the stump with my head (new helmet is about 90euro, heads are best protected) and absorbing the impact with my left wrist (nope, not going to happen) I came up with a cheeky parcour right hand flip off the stump. I was so busy congratulating myself on my ingenuity I forgot to pay any attention to the next bit which was where I piled into the rocks and logs of the forest upside down and left assorted bits of skin behind.

Still, first crash of the season out the way.

Look how happy I am, it's like I don't know what's going to happen in 5 minutes time.

That was kinda that for the day; bikes were starting to need fettling, bodies were tired, and we needed to get home, but plans were getting made already for a return trip once the lifts open again.

Toby. He wheelie wants to come back. Wheelie. Weely. Really. See what I did there?

Cheers once again to Emily and David for being grand hosts and showing us trails, secret trails, secret secret trails (you get the idea…) and where to go for coffee. If you’ve still not booked your alps trip for summer then you could do way worse than check out theinsidelinemtb. Don’t just take my word for it either, proper fast folk like it there too… And cheers to Lorne and Toby for the photos after I forgot my camera. Here’s hoping it’s the start of another class alpine summer.

Crashing, what a bummer.

Posted in Road trip , tagged ,

Lift openings 2018: Houston we have a problem.

Posted on 10th April 2018

Late March or early Autumn riding, depending on which way you look at it.

Like all good popular quotations, it’s not quite right. “Houston we’ve had a problem” was the live version, but who’s going to argue with Tom Hanks?

April 11th 1970, Apollo 13 launched from the Kennedy space centre Florida with the intention of being the 3rd manned mission to the moon. Despite some wee issues on the way up (the Saturn V rocket is a ridiculous bit of engineering, its design started in the era of the pencil and is still the most powerful rocket ever made, the max carried low earth orbit payload of 140,000kg being a long way more impressive than Space-X’s Falcon Heavy and its Tesla car, {It wasnay so good at being re-used right enough, and don’t look too closely at the history of some of the lead engineers} but that much fire power with that little processing power makes fine control a touch tricky and on this launch it had a go at some pretty huge “pogo oscilations” which frankly put any tank-slapper you’ve ever had to shame) the mission had survived 2.5 of their 3 days kicking about in space preparing to nip down for a spot of golf on the moon when there was, in the words of the crew, “a pretty large bang”.

Cue the infamous exchange:

Astronaut J Swigert: “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”
Houston: “This is Houston. Say again, please.”
Astronaut J Lovell: “Uh, Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

Lorne coming in to land, but the face would suggest that there was a slight issue on take off.

The problem what they had had turned out to be the small matter of two of the oxygen tanks emptying into space, leaving the crew in somewhat of a pickle. Not only was that oxygen intended to be breathed in the near future, but more importantly it was also to be used for the fuel cells powering the module.

What followed is one of the more impressive stories of ingenuity and problem solving under stress and should serve as hope that us humans, if we really put our minds to it, can do some gosh darn amazing things. If I were you I’d leave this page now, and go and lose yourself down the internet procrastination wormhole reading about the next 6 days of the mission. You can start most interestingly here, or more quickly here, but given the option definitely take the first read.

Oli loving the April/Autumn conditions, with some fine colour co-ordinating on the backdrop.

Of course, I can do that because I already know what’s written below, you’re probably here because you want to know when the various lifts are open and are well pissed off at having to wade through all that purple prose above.

Soz not soz.

It might feel a bit dreich, but there is a wheen of grip when the trails are like this!

Chamonix, usual CdMB caveats apply, and whilst we’re on the subject, how can a company as rich as CdMB create a website as atrocious as this?

Planpraz: 12th June – 16th September (thanks to the issues with the Midi lift, this opening date has been all over the place, best check the CdMB website for most up to date guess)
Bellevue: 16th June – 23th September
Le Tour: 16th June – 23th September
Flegere: 16th June – 16th September, then 20th October to 4th November
Tramway du Mont Blanc: 16th June – 16th September
Brevent: 16th June – 9th September
Prarion: 23rd June – 16th September
Grands Montets: 23th June – 9th September (*although CdMB have also claimed 16th in emails….)
Vallorcine: 30th June – 2nd September

ACTUAL USEFUL INFORMATION ALERT

Apologies for breaking from tradition again with this wee edit, but here’s MORE useful information! The Tabe chairlift is getting replaced this summer, so as a result the 4×4 trail from Logon lift to the start of the Trapette and Lavancher trails is closed to walkers and bikers, and so is Pierre a Ric. Which doesn’t really leave many options for getting down from Grands Montets on a bike. There is a trail down from the Logon Refuge that might sneak past the bans, but it’s likely bikes simply won’t be allowed up this summer. Will update when I know more, but in the mean time, here’s the legal bit.

Amazing what you can find a stone's throw from a motorway. And yous thought Chamonix was all mountain gnar and endless backdrops.

There’s more to the Alps than Chamonix, what other dates are there:

La Thuile: 30th June – 2nd September (is an educated guess, as ever, dates not up, but that’s the usual)
Megeve: 7th July – 2nd September. When I say Megeve, I mean Jaillet. None of the other lifts, including all the lifts you need for the bike park, are open this summer. Again
Megeve take 2: Mont d’Arbois 22nd June, Rochebrune 30th June, Petite Fontaine 7th July to 2nd September. Megeve is now 2 separate companies with 2 separate approaches to bikes
St Gervais: 22nd June – 2nd September. Longer hours this year. Woop
Les Contamines: Yay, a resort that can give lift opening information less than1 month out from the date. 30th June – 2nd September
Grand Massif: Assorted start and finish times across the area, and they’re not online yet, but basically between 30th June – 26th August
Pila: 23rd June – 9th September (as ever, hopefully longer….)
Portes du Soleil: 29th June – 2nd September, but with some a bit earlier and later (details in the link, I’m not going to spoon feed you)
Verbier: Weekends only from 9th June then all the days from 30th June – 28th October

Oli on the "braap" section of the Servoz freeride trail, air to corner, always good for throwing fun bodyshapes.

But, Uh Houston, we’ve had a problem.

Aye, it wasn’t a completely random intro that.

This winter’s been a record breaker, if you use the records recorded since the late 1990s at least. There is a metric shit-ton of snow above 2000m in the alps just now. On first of April Meteo France was reporting 360cm snow depths on north facing slopes at 2000m. No joke.

1400m altitude in the Chamonix valley, end of March. This, Houston, is a problem.

This is a problem. That snow ain’t going anywhere in a hurry, and even as it melts, it’s going to be busy saturating everything below it for a while to come yet. Normally we’ve got no problems riding the valley trails in late March but instead we’re stuck in Servoz or further down the valley in St Gervais. At least the train’s running fine this year, strikes excepted.

Fortunately the Servoz trails are in great condition now, mostly down to some great trail maintenance work. Many beers are owed to Dave for his fine chainsawing of several bloody big fallen trees and to Oli for making Trois Gullies flow better than it ever has, cheers!

Yes, that's snow falling in shot. Has nobody told the weather it's spring?

Now whilst Apollo 13 was a good news story thanks to human ingenuity, the current human solution to getting rid of lots of snow is to raise the global temperature by a couple of degrees, which whilst undoubtedly effective, is mibbies not the best solution overall.

A fine example of how to air off a root, aim vaguely at the corner below you, and let the wonders of modern mountain bike technology deal with your incompetence.

A few years ago Whistler dug the snow off its bike trails to allow an on-schedule opening of its trails, I wouldn’t hold you breath for that happening in Yaute so perhaps start looking at the lower altitude bits of your maps for the first half of summer this year…

Silver lining time, if you canny ride the normal trails, you need to go explore and find new spots. Like this.

Cheers again to Dave, Wayne and Oli for the trail work, and Lorne for taking most of the photos.

Posted in Chamonix ride, Trail conditions , tagged ,

Sospel. Good Content.

Posted on 6th March 2018

Come to Sospel they said. It's always sunny they said.

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.

Not quite dust and sun, but Ross seems to be enjoying it.

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.

Tim and Joris make the most of the perma summer. Mmm, dry dusty trails under a blue sky.

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.

Tim follows Ash. The bikes are plastic, but not electric.

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.

Bry. The best transfer driver in the alps....?

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.

Joris leads out Ross into the Sospel DH track. Not pictured, sketchy road gaps and slick rocks.

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!

This right turning trail is 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.

Bit of snow on the ground, overcast skies, damp dirt. Could be UK, but it's Provence.

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!

Apparently if you've raced T.P. you'll ken this trail.

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.

Sospel in the snow. This should not look like this.

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.

Shuttle lyfe. In about 100m time we stopped going forwards. Can't accuse Ash of not trying though! No sure many other vehicles in the 06 made it this far, the LAPD certainly didn't...

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.

The plastic bikes were deemed too fragile to survive outside the shuttle, the Edit just needed hit with a stick to break the ice off and she was ready for another lap.

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.

Throw horns and smile. Biking in the snow is infinitely better than not biking at all.

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.

Trans Provence is infamous for its hike a bikes. Doesn't Tim look stoked!

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.

Droppin'. Bit of gradient, not too many roots, perfect.

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.

Playing follow the Bry.

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?

Ross is wearing more clothes than I own and has heated socks. Nae wonder he looks happy wi the world.

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.

Good content that.

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.

Joris came to VTT from motocross. You can tell this, 'cos he got roost.

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.

Mountain biking's coolest sticker? Discuss.

Bonjour, ça va. Good content that.

Posted in Road trip , tagged

Cold War

Posted on 6th December 2017

Cold enough for ya?

The Cold War. Fifty years where the leaders of our wee planet did their best not to have any real fights with anyone else, unless of course anyone else was a small nation that could be played with like a board game.

Quite an expensive board game, the US alone spent $15119.3 billion*, which is a lot of shiny carbon bling or a lot of hungry kids that could be fed. If it helps you to get your head round that number then how about it’s a bigger number than spending $2370 every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every year since Jesus was born (and, in case you’d forgotten, he’s got another birthday coming up. See, it’s topical this, I don’t just throw it together on a whim). $2370 a second, every second, from 4BC until the 5th December 2017, and you still wouldn’t manage to keep up with US military spending during 44 years.

Toby droppin' bikes not bombs. Summer target hit.

Still, in amongst the bombs too big to be dropped and weans being fed radioactive porridge there was some fun stuff too…

Dig out your old transistor radio.

Ok, find a grown up and ask them what a transistor radio is.

Taking to the air-waves. (try the veal, I'm here all week etc.)

Tune the radio to 4625kHz and what do you hear?

The two alternating tones is pretty much all anyone’s heard on the channel since it was first noticed in 1982, except just occasionally, once in a whiles, you get a random Russian word. Nobody who’s telling knows what’s going on here, but as the station is transmitted from sites near St Petersburg and Moscow, most educated guesses say it’s a cold war relic giving Soviet spies instructions over the airwaves.

You’d think with the budgets involved they could stretch to smartphones and WhatsApp.

Have I mentioned it was cold out?

Clawing it back to bikes, it is winter. “Winter is coming” doesn’t cut it right now.

Winter is here and doesn’t look like it’s planning on going anywhere in a hurry. Alas what is not here yet is a particularly deep snowpack so, whilst it’s fun enough scratching about the hills getting some early season turns in on the skis, you’re having to go affy canny to avoid destroying skis or knees.

Shortly after this image was captured, Toby perfectly t-boned a tree and put a good hole in his leg. Proving that avoiding injury by not skiing mibbies isn't a foolproof plan.

Which is why the more committed/daft are still out on their bikes. Put enough clothes on and don’t stop too much and the -10 air temperatures don’t seem to bad, the extra drag from riding through the snow even helps up the exertion levels and keeps you warmer.

Yay.

So the ski season's started, doesn't mean the bike season's finished.

Nordic ski trails and ploughed roads make the uphills relatively easy and trails in the trees, preferably not too rooty and with helpful berms for the bends, make for good descending. I’m not saying I want to ride snow covered trails every. damn. day. of the year, but for a change for a wee bit of fun, it’s pretty good.

Toby mistakes his Reign for a RM250. Braaaap.

As ever at the start or end of the bike season, it’s Servoz we head to. The road up from the village is cleared and I’m sure it gets easier every time, then no matter which of the many trails you take to head back down, as long as it’s not the 4×4 track you’ll be treated to fun singletrack through the trees and, in the case of the trail Toby and I hit, a wheen of built features to play about on.

Well, if your wheels are in the air you can’t slide.

My wheels are not in the air, and I'm sliding. I may look like I know where I'm going, but the following 5 frames will attest that I don't.

Anyways, hopefully it’ll either snow more soon so skiing proper can get underway, or the weather copies last year patterns, goes full mass snow destruction and we can get some dusty bike laps in. Win win. Unlike the old cold war which more of a no-score draw kinda game.

Who knew an afternoon playing bikes in the woods would lead to a blog post about military excess...

*Ish, kinda, maybe. Numbers here aren’t exactly the domain of a second rate MTB blogger, but that figure is for the years 1946-1990, inflation corrected to 2010 levels, in US billions, which is a thousand million, or 1,000,000,000.** And I’m assuming Jesus was born in 4BC on 25th December, which is another kettle of assumptive fish. And possibly loaves too. Questionable sources here and here.

**The Greenlandic native language (despite operating on a base of 20) only goes up to the number 12, after which they just used “many”. I think we can safely use similar language at this point for the dolla spent. ‘Mr Obama, how much did you spend on drones?’ ‘Many.’

Posted in Chamonix ride, Trail conditions , tagged ,