Chamonix Bike Blog

Tag: Lift opening

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
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
Les Arcs: Putting the Fun in Funiculaire

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…

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.

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.

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.

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

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….

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

29/04/2018
Lift openings 2018: Houston we have a problem.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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 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…

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

10/04/2018
Turning over

You might not be thinking of the same movie as me, but you’ll have seen the generic scene often enough.

Two men walk into a dusty and run down barn. At the back of a barn, below a dust sheet soiled by several years of dirt, lies a car shaped object. The dust sheet is whipped off in a cloud of said dust and a disturbed chicken or two to reveal an outdated but none the less impressive sports car. The ‘hood’ is ‘popped’ (it’s always an american movie) and, after a brief tinker with the engine, the main protagonist turns the key. The engine turns over once then bursts into life, settling quickly into a purposeful V8 growl. Cue line about being back in the game.

Anyone who’s done anything similar in real life knows that nothing will happen until you give up and put a new battery in, then once the engine catches it dies pretty quickly as you discover a rodent has chewed through most of the filters. Even once you manage to get it ticking over, it takes a couple of weeks until all the problems get found, fixed, and the engine starts emitting anything close to a purr.

Starting the bike blog up in the spring runs much closer to real life than the movies. Despite this, it’s the start of April and, like a normally aspirated 4 cylinder plant from a family car, things are running reliably enough and it looks like everything’s going to survive to the next MOT.

Might as well crack on, when do the lifts open?

Chamonix (usual CdMB caveats apply)
Bellevue: 10th June – 24th September
Brevent/Planpraz: 10th June – 17th September
Le Tour: 17th June – 24th September
Flegere: 17th June – 17th September, then 21st October to 5th November
Tramway du Mont Blanc: 17th June – 3rd September
Grand Montets: 24th June – 10th September
Prarion: 1st July – 3rd September
Vallorcine: 1st July – 3rd September

Those of you with a memory, or the wherewithal to use google, will have noticed that most of the lifts are opening a week later/closing a week earlier/both, compared to last year. Chamonix’s Marie is also looking into ways to encourage more cyclists to visit during the summer. Go figure.

How about another way of looking at it. After a below par winter for snow, where are the lifts already open? As well as the usual all-year suspects (Saleve, Dorinaz, Bex…) you can right now, right there, go play uplift bikes at Verbier and Pila until the ski season ends and they shut for spring maintenance. The Chamonix train should be in there too, but it closes 2nd April until late June for (more) works and the replacement bus service doesn’t take bikes. In defense of the train, we did have the cheeriest conductor on the ride back from Servoz a couple days ago who let 2 of us away with no paying saying “you’ve forgotten your Gen du Pays, yes….”

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

La Thuile: 24th June – 3rd September (probably, dates not up yet, check here for when they update it) http://www.lathuile.it/datapage.asp?id=404
Megeve: 1st July – 17th 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. http://www.lesportesdumontblanc.fr/fr/2017/03/27/previsions-douverture-ete-2017/
St Gervais: Not up yet, but probably 1st July – 3rd September http://www.ski-saintgervais.com/fr/ete/tarifs-ete/remontees-mecaniques.php
Les Contamines: 1st July – 3rd September http://www.lescontamines.net/home_calendar.html
Grand Massif: Assorted start and finish times across the area, and they’re not online yet, but basically between 1st July – 27th August http://ete.grand-massif.com/les-tarifs
Pila: Not up yet, spotting a theme yet, but probably 24th June – 10th September (mibbies longer….) http://www.pila.it/en/pila/estate/stagione-estiva/
Portes du Soleil: Also still not up yet, but likely 23rd June – 27th August with some earlier and later http://en.portesdusoleil.com/summer-lifts.html
Verbier: All weekends in June (but the Le Chable-Verbier leg is closed) then 3rd July – 39th October http://www.verbierbikepark.ch/horaires_fr.php

Anyways, until the dates above, it’s mostly trips to the south and pedalling uphills. Around Chamonix anything south facing and below 1700m is fine to ride, north facing you’ll still be finding snow from 1300m but for the most part the trails are clear a fair bit higher.

Lets go play on bikes.

02/04/2017