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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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….
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.
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.
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.
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.
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*.
*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.
