Tag Archives: St Gervais

All the lifts.

Posted on 17th August 2018
The shot of the day, but where and when is it taken....?
We tried to ride every mountain bike accessible lift on the Chamonix Mont Blanc Unlimited lift pass. All 14 of them. Did we succeed? Well you'll need to read to find out won't you.
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The Escher trail

Posted on 31st August 2017
Am I riding uphill or downhill? Damn you optical illusions.
If you don't go, you won't know....but if you don't know, should you go? Hunting for the perfect trail out by Les Contamines.
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St Gervais / So that was the first big crash of the summer

Posted on 11th July 2016
How's that for a berm with a background?

“starts Thursday as usual with a canteen quiz and again no-one wins the big cash prize” Means nothing to you? No, well, your loss.

It’s been hard to keep track of events recently. The constant state of flux between what’s in and out, who’s calling the shots, behind the scenes negotiations, false promises. The dust seems to be settling now though and it seems the state of play is this:

Brevent & Flegere. No playing on bikes, or at least no uplift for bikes, until the bike ban ends at the start of September.

Megeve, Les Contamines, St Gervais & … [Read full post]

Posted in Chamonix ride, Trail conditions , tagged , ,

Link up

Posted on 28th September 2014
There was a lot of spot the rider shots from today.

Want to know what the next big thing’s going to be in mountain biking? Look at other mountain sports; skiing, snowboarding, mountaineering, fell running. Trail centres are a bike only thing? Snowboarding went crazy for snowparks in the mid 90’s. These newfangled “enduro” bikes that are fairly light up hill but a virtually DH bikes on the down? Skiing’s been doing the fat touring ski and DIN 16 touring binding for ages*. Big days out linking your favourite trails….

OK, so we’ve been doing that for a while too, but mountaineers got there first. With the concentration of hardcore climbers … [Read full post]

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‘Effing excellent

Posted on 15th September 2014
Spence seemed to enjoy his first time.

You might not have noticed, but there’s a wee bit of a referendum happening in Scotland next week. It seems that Westminster hadn’t noticed either as over the last 7 days there’s been a sudden realisation that folks north of the border might just go vote for independence, and for reasons other than watching Braveheart too many times. Cue a love bombing campaign of Scotland. Promises that we won’t take you for granted, we won’t ignore you, it’ll be different this time, trust us, we’re politicians…

But this isn’t a political blog, so what’s with the intro? Well, I worry … [Read full post]

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Bikes on a train, and other forms of mechanical uplift.

Posted on 15th June 2014
Today I am mostly liking green

Lifts are open, no more pretending that pedalling uphill is worthy and good.

An opening party was being held at Le Tour with demo bikes, drinks and rumours of new trails, so we headed in the opposite direction to Les Houches.

It seemed a fairly popular choice and it was surprising to see just how much the main DH track wore in over the course of the day.

Not having big bikes in addition to our normal bikes with their mere 160mm of travel, slack angles and huge brakes, Lorne & I rode a few laps of the Prarion front … [Read full post]

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This is mountain biking.

Posted on 26th September 2013
If you're going to fall, try to fall right.

You hear “Epic” describing a lot of things about Chamonix. Surrounded by deeds of derring do from alpinist, skiers, parapontists and such then as a lowly mountainbiker you really have to work to earn the title “epic” for a ride. You could try having horrendous weather to battle through, major mechanicals that required ingenuity & creativity to overcome and make it back. Distance, height gain, length of time riding are options for epic. Injuries can count too because after all, epic doesn’t have to mean good.

So why do I think this ride should count as epic? It wasn’t particularly … [Read full post]

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Tricot treat

Posted on 17th September 2012

There’s definitely an autumn feeling in the air. Meeting in town at 09.30 we were all wearing jackets and looking for the sun. Our ride for the day was more of an autumn objective too, less about maximum vertical on the lifts and more about getting out into them thar hills. As Jan said, it felt more like going ski touring than biking. After a tip off from Tom that the trail down from the Col de Tricot was every bit as good, if not better, than the map suggested, we thought we’d give it a go before the weather … [Read full post]

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