Chamonix Bike Blog

Tag: bike ban

How to ride a bike in Chamonix.

“There’s no such thing as a new idea”. A phrase well kent in magazine journalism. You pretty quickly wind through the various permutations of articles you can write about bikes and, unless you are a genuinely talented journalist (and if you are, then the $ ain’t in blethering ’bout bikes), you start repeating yourself.

Even this intro is a repeat of an intro I used in 2014 to explain why I was repeating myself.

To save it getting too meta, I’m not going to repeat the rest of that article, instead I’m going to spear off on a new well trodden tangent.

The ‘how to’ article.

At least this one is covering newish ground. I don’t think anyone’s written a how to go play bike in Chamonix piece before. So, without further ado (as in I’m boring even myself now), here is all the info you wanted to know but couldn’t find on the crime-against-marketing that is the compagnie du mont blanc website.

Lifts.

These are the lifts you can take your bike on, you can find roughly when they are open here.

Le Tour/ Vallorcine: Lift info here Mellow angled flowy riding on the whole, with some great stuff down into Switzerland

Grands Montets: Lift info here Limited riding, but some good trails worth a look none the less. Limited is a relative term in Chamonix after all. A wee fly in the ointment. The GM lift burnt down in autumn 2018 and is not scheduled to be rebuilt until 2020 or later. We wait with baited breath to see if the Plan Joran lift opens for bikes….

Flegere: Lift info here If you don’t like rocks, tech, or big views you’re unlikely to enjoy Flegere.

Brevent: Lift info here There is a LOT of riding from Brevent, but it’s all on the steeper, more technical side of things.

Les Houches: Lift info here The much overlooked, underappreciated hotspot of Chamonix biking. Huge amounts of trails with more being added all the time and also the gateway to the larger Portes du Mont Blanc area.

Tramway du Mont Blanc: Lift info here 100 year old lift infrastructure that works great for bikes, getting you back into the Chamonix valley

Then, not actually Chamonix, but covered by the “unlimited” Chamonix lift pass as well as the local lift passes you have:

Mont d’Arbois Petite Fontaine & Rochebrune: Lift info here The Portes du Mont Blanc are a bit like the whole Les Gets/Morzine area, but without any people and only a couple of purpose built trails.

Jaillet: Lift info here Riding out of Megeve, and with a maze of great trails underneath it.

Bettex St Gervais: Lift info here Home to one of the best greeny/blue flow trails in the alps.

Les Contamines: Lift info here Hidden away at the top of a long dark valley, doesn’t get the attention it deserves from aficionados of lift accessed big mountain scenery riding.

Lift Passes.

So you know what lifts you can use, but what lifts can you afford to use? In 2018 you had 3 choices.

1) 22.00 euro VTT day pass which gives you a day unlimited use of the lifts at Le Tour OR Les Houches OR Grands Montets (except Grands Montets was closed to bikes for 2018, then burnt down, so really just the first 2 choices).

2) 32.50 euro gives you all of the above on the same day, but you need to get between the areas yourself.

3) 65.00 euro everything pass which means you can use all the lifts listed above, and the non bike accessible lifts too, so also the Midi etc. If you’re fitting bikes around tourism then this pass is for sure the best bet, and if you’re out for a week then the full area summer pass is actually pretty good value at 126 euro for 6 days, and worth getting for the access to the Tramway Mont Blanc and Portes du Mont Blanc region alone.

The lift pass prices page is hidden on the CdMB website here. Another option if you’re riding here a lot during the summer is the rapidcard, which is a one off purchase of 25 to 50 euro for the card, then every day you use it is much reduced compared to the normal daypass price, with the added advantage of covering the lifts that aren’t on the VTT pass so you can easily ride the Brevent/Flegere/Tramway lifts without a fight at the ticket desk….

If on the off chance you’ve accidentally gone to Chamonix for a full season, you’ll probably want a full season pass. Info for that is actively hidden on the CdMB site, it’s actually part of the residency test to work out how to buy the pass. Here’s the start of a breadcrumb trail for anyone who think’s I’m joking.

Trails.

There are some restrictions on where and when you can ride a bike in Chamonix and surrounds, but it’s really not that hard, you just need to ask yourself one question: Is it July / August or not?

No- then you can ride anywhere that isn’t the Aiguille Rouge National Park. The park is well marked on the IGN maps and with little posts on every trail that goes over the park boundary. Simples.

Yes-, then Arrete du Marie 008576/2018 comes into force and you can only ride those listed tracks in the valley. This isn’t really an issue. All those other trails are covered in walkers and trail runners and you canny get any flow at all. At either end of the valley, Les Houches and Le Tour, you have some different rules. Les Houches only limits bikes on the “Grand Sentiers”, so the GR5/Tour du Mont Blanc trail from Bellevue. Fine, just use the recently resurrected DH track. Le Tour has the same limits on the Chamonix side, but the Vallorcine side is a different commune, so no stoppage, and the rest of area accessed from the lifts is in Switzerland where again, bikes are allowed on all the trails as long as you give way to walkers and don’t damage the trails. Saying that, the Tour du Mont Blanc route from Tete du Balme round to Trient has an unofficial ban (think like the voluntary Snowdon ban) during the busy periods of the summer. Fortunately it’s also not the best, or even second best trail round there, so it’s no great hardship to miss it out during July and August.

If all that’s too much hassle to deal with, you could always just hire a guide: Alpineflowmtb, guiding you to your new best trail ever.

Trail etiquette. Guess what. You ain’t that important. The town, authorities, lift company, none of them really give a shit whether you come here to bike or not. The biking euro is useful, but compared to the money brought in by walkers, trail runners, alpinistes and skiers… it’s nothing. So if one user group is going to get banned, it’ll be bikes.

Simply put, we are worth the least to the valley. So we kinda have to play nice and not give anyone the excuse to extend any of the existing restrictions. For 99% of the folks biking in Chamonix, this isn’t a problem but there’s always someone who doesn’t quite get it. A refresher if you need it; Say hello (or bonjour, salut, ciao, whatever you’re comfy with), smile, make eye contact, slow down when passing other trail users, slow down to a stop at the side of the trail if it’s narrow, don’t skid every. damn. corner, don’t make cut lines. And some of you really won’t like this but outside of the bike parks, maybe don’t wear a full face helmet. If you’re riding quick enough to think you need the extra protection, you’re probably going too fast for a shared use trail. If you are worried about the trail being too technical and you think you’ll be crashing lots on the way down, perhaps an easier trail will be more fun for you, and most folks walk at least one section on a long descent. A full face lidded, goggle wearing rider barreling down the trail is pretty intimidating and freaks folk out. But, if folks can see your face and make eye contact, conflict is way less likely. Almost everyone you meet is going to be friendly and encouraging, so please don’t give the 1% any more ammunition than they can already make up.

Or to summarise: Be nice, say hi. Don’t be a dick.

Public Transport.

Sometimes you want to take your mode of transport onto another mode of transport. In the Chamonix valley you can use both bus and train with the bike. The bike buses that ran from 23rd June to 2nd September in 2018 (similar dates each year) and are in practice free (best carry your carte d’hote) and take you from the town centre to the lifts at Prarion and Le Tour. You can also fit up to 5 bikes on the trains, or considerably more if no one is being a jobsworth, but don’t count on that. The train is free between Servoz and Vallorcine with your Carte d’hote, you have to pay for it from Le Fayet up to Chamonix or from Vallorcine onwards to Switzerland. You can check the train times here.

What’s a carte d’hote I hear you ask? Well, when you stay in a chalet/airbnb/hotel/campsite/whatever, the proprietor will charge you “tax de sejour” or a day tax for being a tourist in the valley. Part of what this tax gets you is a business card sized, umm, card which is for free transport in the valley. If you don’t get given this either your accommodation provider has forgotten, is cheating you out of money, or is not paying tax. Either ways, you should get a card. If you’re staying with friends the tourist info office will happily sell you a card for about the cost of 1 train journey, so it’s a fairly simple cost/benefit analysis to make.

Bike hire and repairs.

Sometime you break your bike and it can be fixed, sometimes it can’t, sometimes that super lightweight rigid singlespeed fat bike just ain’t gonna cut the mustard, sometimes you decide you want an e-bike. All and more of these issues can be dealt with at the following places: Slash, Zero-G, Legend CHX, Echobase

Other stuff.

What is the best bike to ride in Chamonix? Any bike you want really, but the Airdrop Edit is hard to beat… DH focused geometry without being a DH bike, 150mm travel at the back with a bit more at the front, solid reliable build but more than capable of going up the hill under your power too.

I’ve finished riding, where do we toast a successful day shredding the gnar? Anywhere that sells Sapaudia beer. Obviously. Which just happens to be Bighorn, Le Vert and Beckett & Wilde, with more to come…

Yeah, pretty blatant, but Airdrop and Sapaudia have both believed in me and this blog enough to help out when they have plenty of other things to be cracking on with (like making excellent bikes and fine ales), and that in turn is helping you out, so why not support them a bit too for the help you’ve just got.

03/12/2018
All the lifts.

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…..

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

*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’

17/08/2018
Milestones

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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…

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: 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.

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.

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.

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.

21/06/2018
Unintended consequences/Chamonix Bike Ban

In 1958 Chairman Mao, the well known mountain biker and modernist, issued a decree titled “the four pests campaign” with the intention of purging China of (the latest) four greatest enemies of the people: Rats, mosquitos, flies and sparrows.

To deal with the particular threat of the sparrow, the nation was mobilised. Men, women, children and, the linchpin of any agricultural based economy, grandparents unleashed their full fury on the mighty and terrifying sparrow. In addition to the obvious tactics of smashing the nests, breaking the eggs and just running about shooting the birds, whole cities would turn out in their millions to bang pots together and scare the poor things into the air. The cacophony would continue for hours, sometimes days, stopping the sparrows from landing until they dropped, dead exhausted, from the sky.

Alas, it turned out the evil winged consumer of grain and rice was also a kinda useful consumer of pests and insects. Whilst the sparrows did eat the crops, they didn’t eat anything like the amount that the insects who were thriving in their absence did.

There was nothing for it. Mao had to change his 4 least favourite animals to rat, mosquito, fly and bed bug, let the sparrow re-establish itself, and then get on with believing 150 grams of rice was a reasonable daily ration (is there a graph plotting percentage of a nation underweight verses said nations leader’s obesity?) and that melted down woks would produce high enough grade steel to build an industrialised nation. These latest great leaps forward would help him into the very upper tier of despots, and contribute to the death of somewhere between 30 and 55 million people, to date still a dictator high score of own peoples killed through incompetence and hubris.

Lucky the incompetent and hubristic world leader is a thing of the past eh.

Of course, what’s the issue with a few million deaths when you have the far more important first world problem of not getting to ride a handful of trails and 3 lifts for 2 months of the year. Snowflakes.

So yeah, there’s this “bike ban” thing in Chamonix, which from some of the comments floating about the internet (and comments on social media and forums are obviously representative of the majority of human opinion) seems to mean to most folk that all trails in Chamonix and a 50km radius are completely forbidden to bikes, all the year, and that it’s some form of dark conspiracy against anyone holding a lift pass from Compagnie du Mont Blanc so they can take your money then stop you from using the lifts.

First off, the Chamonix bike ban, or Arrete du Marie 006872/2016 to give it it’s Sunday name, is only applied during July and August, and only on the trails within the Chamonix commune (and with the exception of those exceptions listed in the arrete). The rest of the time the trails are just as legal to ride as anywhere else in Haute Savoie. July and August also happens to be the busiest times of year for walkers and trail runners, the trails in the valley are just too busy to get any flow going. I get that if you’re only going to be in Chamonix for 1 week of your life and it’s August and you really, really want to ride from Brevent then it’s frustrating, but for everyone else, there’re better places to ride during those months. Ban or no ban. There’s a minority of riders that really ain’t helping things either by not using the universal “don’t be a dick” rule and no slowing down whiles passing other folk on the trails, skidding their way through cut lines and generally being dicks.

Don’t be a dick.

As for the lifts, again, the only lifts closed to bikes that are otherwise open are the Brevent and Flegere lifts. So Le Tour, Grand Montets, Les Houches, Tramway du Mont Blanc (and if you have the annual or summer season pass Les Contamines, Megeve, St Gervais, Combloux) are all still open during the ban. And you can still go the Brevent and Flegere lifts.

You just canny take your bike.

Or wingsuit.

From Grand Montets only the Lavancher bowl trail is officially open, though strangely there never seems to be many people on any of the other ways down from there….probably because most of them are a bit rubbish.

Le Tour; yup, Posettes trails are included in the ban area. Plenty of folk ignore the closure, it’s a cracking trail after all, but during the morning through most of the day it’s hoaching with walkers so really, what’s the point of never getting to ride at any speed when you could hit any of the trails from the Vallorcine gondola legally and with way less traffic? Or you could pedal up to the trails down from Loriaz chalets. Then there’s all the trails over in Switzerland that start from Le Tour.

Les Houches, like Vallorcine, isn’t in the Chamonix commune so the arrete doesn’t apply. Instead they have their own arrete, Arrete No 13/046, which prohibits biking only on the “great walking trails” implying any of the not so great trails are fine…. GR5 counts as a great trail, officially and critically. Those of you who’ve spent too much time watching legal dramas will probably notice that the linked arrete is only valid until 30th September 2013, and no I canny find a more up to date document online, wouldn’t it be ironic if bringing this to attention got it updated in a more draconian manner.

So aye, it’s frustrating, not getting to ride on the doorstep in Chamonix, but for plenty folks the result of the ban is just looking a bit further afield. Looking closer at the trails they can ride in the valley, looking where they can ride at Le Tour and Les Houches, looking where they can ride beyond the valley. If that’s too hard, try having a look at the trails suggested in the Chamonix Bike Book, or hire a guide. Mibbies as the numbers of VTTists at Les Houches and Le Tour continue to rise, forced out of the more convenient spots to town, the Marie will be forced to make changes to further fill its coffers with biking dollar and reinstate the bike trails at Flegere.

Doubt it. More importantly, it’s not that big an issue, quit whining.

If you want to read more about China (sorry, CHYNAAH. Trump rules) then give Wild Swans by Jung Chang a go.

12/07/2017
Loriaz v1.5

Big fan of the Loriaz ride, fairly easy up, great views, few people and an excellent descent. Hard to fault really.

But it’s easy to get complacent about these things, it’s good to mix it up a bit. What if Neo had chosen the blue pill?

So, after a run in with the SNCF’s grumpiest conductor who wouldn’t let 1/2 the cyclists at Chamonix central onto the train and a little over 60 minutes of climbing Lorne and I stood ready at the Croix de Loriaz ready to eschew the truth of the red pill/normal Loriaz trail and explore the illusion of the blue/turning right onto the other way down the hill.

In truth, we both kinda knew where we were going, having been up the trail several times in the winter on ski touring missions. But then, things generally look a bit different with a couple foot of snow on them and this was particularly evident above the tree line where the trail snaking through the undergrowth was strewn with boulders.

Far from unridable, but tricky to master with any flow.

From the tree line down things were much more agreeable, unsurprisingly pretty similar to the normal Loriaz descent. Not better mind, but still a fun trail.

The main reason for never giving the trail a go before is that it spits you out onto the ascent track about 40% of the way up, and no one want to coast down the same fireroad they sweated up.

Fortunately there’s a selection of trails that mean you only need to ride a few hundred metres on 4×4 track, so no great loss. Choosing the line signposted to Le Nant for no reason other than it went in the opposite direction to the road we continued down.

I know you shouldn’t anthropomorphise animals let alone trails, but this section of trail did have slightly schizophrenic tendencies. Lulling you into a false sense of security with swooping single track you’d attack a bend behind a rock only to discover hidden rock gardens or off camber roots. Alternatively an innocuous 90 degree bend would suddenly plunge you straight down the hill through rubble.

Still, all good fun.

Popping back out on the road half way twixt Vallorcine and Buet we considered a re-match with the conductor, but instead pedalled up over the col and cruised down a selection of valley trails back to Chamonix.

Which is better then, reality or illusion? The original trail I’d say, but there’s no harm in a bit of a change every now and then.

31/05/2015