Chamonix Bike Blog

Tag: St Gervais

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
The Escher trail

There’s been a running joke for a few years now that, as well as the Chamonix Bike Book, there should be a Chamonix Don’t Bike Book. A bible for Chamonix riders of the trails that, no matter how tempting they look on the map, just ain’t worth the hassle. Dinnay bother.

Prime examples would be the auspicious looking dashed line heading NE from the Col de Balme past La Remointse (the descent from the Refuge des Grands would be fun enough, if your enthusiasm somehow survives the preceding hike a bike). Then there’s the trail from the Refuge de Logan down to Argentiere, which does start promisingly enough (….then keeps suggesting it’s going to get better again, then just gives up and dumps you out onto 500m vert of rubble). And how many naive riders have rocked up at the top of Brevent full of enthusiasm to take the track down towards Col du Brevent and round to Pont d’Arieve (there’s a reason the bitter old locals just carry up from Planpraz to Col du Brevent and it’s not that we like carrying our bikes)?

All this isn’t to say that unrideable trails can’t be part of a good day out on the bike….

With the look of ovine compliance only those who don’t know what’s about to happen can truly nail, Dave, Tim and Robbie followed me to the Bellevue lift to join the hikers and e-bikers and start the ride. Robbie did have an inkling of what was about to happen, he’s been on my exploratory rides before and also up to the Col Du Tricot, but it turns out he’d forgotten all the bad bits. Or maybe blanked them out as part of a coping mechanism. Hard to tell.

Anyways, the descent down to the snout of the Bionassay Glacier is classic big mountain mountain biking. Huge views, a good trail, occasional exposure and the odd bit that it’s probably for the best if you don’t ride.

The trail culminates with the photo stop classic of the wire bridge, which still isn’t any easier to ride with 650mm+ bars but a pure dead good wheelie could get you to the other side. At which point rider stops riding bike and bike rides rider. With the advantage of youth, fitness and no knowledge of how long the climb is, Tim and Dave pulled off into the lead whilst Robbie and I set a more relaxed pace.

Considerable skepticism as to the ridablility of the descent for the Col du Tricot was being expressed by walkers on the way up and Dave and Tim didn’t seem completely convinced by Robbie and my assertions to the contrary. Fortunately on reaching the col and looking down all doubts were assuaged and lunch one could be enjoyed with the view of the descent to come.

The trail’s changed a bit from the last time it was written about here but only 2 short sections weren’t ridden by anyone in the team, mostly due to a combination of fear of smashing brake rotors and the amount of goat poo on the track.

At the chalets Miage the first trail choice had to be made. Another 200m of hike a bike over Mont Truc
[Cartographer: You there, local hick, what do you call this insignificant mountain?
Local Hick: Indecipherable.
Cartographer {to scribe}: God knows, call it Mount Thingy] to get to a grand wee trail I knew down to Les Contamines or roll the dice with the 4×4 track traverse round the hill to an unknow line on the map that would also drop us down to Les Contamines.

We gambled and, at first at least, it seemed we’d rolled double sixes. The traverse was pretty quick and the short climb pretty easy. Dropping into the singletrack (or straight off the singletrack in Tim’s case) we found a smashing wee trail that snaked down the hill with a fine balance of narrow and tech without loosing flow too much. Then it went uphill for a bit, then a fainter trail descended from the climb. Obviously we took the descending trail. It wasn’t quite as good as the trail before, loamy straights into hairpin turns, but still plenty fun, before it spat us out onto an overgrown 4×4 track.

A slightly too late look at the map showed we should have suffered up the climb for another couple of minutes more and we would have had a longer descent down to Les Contamines. As it was the 4×4 was pretty interesting as these things go and we headed down to Les Contamines and on to the Telecabine de la Gorge.

The Mont Blanc Unlimited lift pass covers a huge area of lifts in the summer, however with such a spread of lifts comes some idiosyncrasies. The lower half of the Les Contamines lifts runs no stop during the day, the upper half closes from 1230 to 1345. On a completely unrelated matter, at the mid station there’s a little paddling lake and a couple of cafes. Nothing for it but to sit with the feet in the lake eating icecream. And “help” Robbie fix a slow puncture.

Once the lift had opened and carried us up to 1875m the main part of the day could start. Following the trail that traverses from the ski area out towards the Chalets d Roselette and then from there on to the Lacs Jovet.

And at first it seemed ok. Not fully rideable but not too far off. Then there were some slightly harder bits to carry the bike across then. Then to carry the bike up. Then to carry the bike down. Carrying the bike down is not a good sign, group enthusiasm starts to drop off pretty quickly once you have to carry the bike downhill.

By the time we’d finished climbing and carrying and climbing our way down across the first half of traverse to the trail that scampered back towards Les Contamines it wasn’t hard to find a bunch of perfectly rational reasons why it would make much more sense to head back that way rather than continue with the original plan.

At first the trail was pretty good, though the novelty of just being on the bike and rolling across the terrain without much effort possibly helped this assessment. Even this trail then started to head up hill, even as it was definitely loosing height.

What an achievement, we’d found the fabled Escher trail. Like an alpine Electric Brae we seemed doomed to keep ascending to the base of the trail forever.

Fortunately we’re all rational folk and physics quickly re-asserted itself. We joined the furtherest south of the trails we normally ride from the Les Contamines lifts. It pointed downhill and stayed downhill. And it’s a really good trail too. Braap, laugh, wheelie and drift our way down towards the Nant Borant refuge. With a quick excursion off the bike and into the undergrowth for Robbie.

We could have gone for another lap or two off the Les Contamines lifts, but the prospect of letting gravity pull us down towards St Gervais along the riverside singletrack through Les Contamines followed by ice cold sugary drinks and an earlier tramway back into the Chamonix valley was too much to resist, so we enjoyed the last of the 1000 or so meters of descent that counts for a way home out here and I mentally put another red line onto the map of trails in my head. Not fully scored out, but for now mibbies best leave that one alone and just pedal up from the valley floor to explore the trails near Lacs Jovet. Another time, there’s trails straight off the lifts to be ridden before the summer ends…

31/08/2017
St Gervais / So that was the first big crash of the summer

“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 & Combloux. All good and all included on the Mont Blanc Unlimited lift pass.

Nowt for it but to skip Brevent and Flegere, pedal down the valley to Prarion then over to St Gervais for some exploring.

Conveniently, getting to St Gervais involves riding Who’s Way, which is maybe my favourite trail off the lifts in Chamonix. Certainly one of the more complete. Today it was even more complete with 2 sidewall slits in my possibly a bit past their best tyres. Lessons learnt being 1) tyres have a finite life span 2) when the sealant is pissing through the sidewall, it’s not going to plug itself 3) remember to put your tyre plugs in the rucsac you’re taking with you on that ride and 4) Lorne’s Lezyne minipump is infinitely better than my Specialized minipump.

Anyway, slightly slower than usual, we make it to St Gervais, where the next hold up is the unique shuttle timing system of the St Gervais lifts. They run for 5 minutes every 30 minutes. Don’t expect to get Pleney style fast laps here.

The next main difference to Pleney is when you get to the designated blue “whizz” trail (honestly, what possesses folks to give trails such awful names) and discover a complete absence of braking bumps. A hardtail would be a better weapon than a DH bike. A BMX bike would do the job pretty well if the dust isn’t too loose.

This is a good thing mind. Being based in Chamonix means I read commentary on t’interwebz about the death of “real” riding and the takeover of flow trails with a hint of bemusement. We just dinnay have anything like that near to us, so it’s a grand wee treat to get to ride a well sculpted flow trail where we hardly had to pedal or brake for 6km and just pumped transitions and found things to hop over.

After a lap for photos, it was still lunch time at the lift. (oh, aye, forgot to mention, closes 1200-1330) so we had an icecream (Lorne being well pissed off that there were no Calypsos) then went up for another lap with no stops before exploring other trails.

It should have been no stops.

There’s a bit of boardwalk about a third of the way down where I was just thinking “this’d be bloody lethal in the wet” then I was sliding across said boardwalk using my skin as a brake. I’d also tried to impale myself on my bars, which wasn’t apparent at first, but got worked out by not being able to breath for a minute or so, my favourite bike t-shirt being ripped open pretty much nip to nip, and a line of broken skin from sternum to my left bicep.

And that was pretty much the end of my day really. I was blinking sore, felt like I’d been kicked by a donkey and didn’t have the spirit for exploring. So instead of me now getting to tell you about the pure super-sick-gnar-fest of megarad natural singletrack we then found…..we cruised back to Le Fayet on easy trails, took the tramway back to Bellevue then the “easy” way down of GR5. Which is still a fair bit of good riding.

Plenty more days to explore this summer, so we’ll be back with something more useful before long, but until then, give the St Gervais trails a go. It’s not going to keep you entertained all day, but it’s pretty good for a bit of a change.

11/07/2016
Link up

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 around Chamonix the main lines got climbed fairly quick, so how to make it more interesting? Enchain a load of them. This got particularly entertaining in the 80’s when not content with just climbing lots of hard routes, climbers would hanglide between lines, resplendent in Raybans and headscarfs.

So we thought we’d get in on the act.

Just the Bellevue lift left open now, but it’s probably the best lift any to get into more mountainy terrain. An efficient early start saw Spence and me at the top of the lift by 11am ready to link 2 of the best rides in the valley. The Nid d’Aigle and Col du Tricot.

The initial climb to Col Mont Lachat went as smoothly as ever, and also as ever we couldn’t pass the abandoned jet engine test station without having a poke about. If you want to do the same get up there quick as apparently it’s to be demolished this autumn.

As the tramway’s closed now until the winter it’s an easy (relatively speaking….) push up the tracks to the top station at 2372m and a selection of Mont Blanc ascentionists descending and aspirants ascending. It says something about Chamonix that everyone accepted our response of ‘the summit, Mont Blanc’ when we were asked where we were headed.

A relaxed lunch in the sun later, we dropped in to the first descent of the day. The trail was just as good as last year, the views just as distracting, and the section by the ladders just as unridable (unless you’re this guy). Some things never change, just like the 650m descent went so much quicker than the 570m climb.

The trail to Bionassey we followed last year crosses the track climbing to the Col du Tricot, so here we hung a left and headed down through the techy singletrack to the swing bridge. Our handlebars have got wider still, but the bridge remains as narrow, nae riding this time.

Reaching the col a little after 2 we had the hill almost to ourselves, a nice change from the last few rides from the col, benefits of not getting started early I guess. The geology is fairly mobile up here and the descent had evolved a little from last time, but still 100% ridable and 95% fun. It’s only the access route for the second section anyway.

With a huge amount of effort, I managed to stop this time to fire off a couple of photos of the trail, but they really don’t show how good it is. From the chainring gouges on some of the rocks I think a few more folk are finding out for themselves, maybe I should start saying the trails no good?

The road kilometres from Villette to St Gervais give a welcome respite to the arms and a chance to enthuse about how good the trail was and how well you rode it….or otherwise, before the final bit of interest on the pipeline trail from St Gervais to Le Fayet. Why’s it called pipeline? As Spence said; if you don’t know, you’ve not ridden it.

Of course, whilst the tramway being closed made our life easier at the start of the day, it now meant we couldn’t just hop back up to Bellevue and finish off a triptych of trails with the GR5. Instead we got to miss the train to Chamonix whilst I tried to work the automated ticket machine, then go for a beer in the sun whilst we waited for the next one.

Could this be the best ride in Chamonix? If you can only ride “one” trail then maybe these 2, linked in with GR5 to get you back into the valley, is where it’s at.

But then, you could always start from town and ride Aiguillet des Houches from Brevent to Les Houches first.

Or….

*So smart arse, where’s mountain biking going next? Well, snowboarding’s all about the split board, so I guess we’ll be keeping the all-mountain/enduro thing going. Skiing seems to be getting into lightweight rando-racing equipment and lycra though. Maybe mountain biking does lead the way sometimes.

28/09/2014
‘Effing excellent

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 I might have been doing something similar with Chamonix. After a summer of racing across France I’ve seen amazing trails, great riding scenes, understanding lift companies and Chamonix’s been forgotten, just there for the day to day rides. Fortunately the last 2 days as we squeeze the last out of each closing lift has reminded me just how ‘effing excellent the riding is here.

Lacking the tech of Brevent & Flegere, and the huge views of Le Tour, Les Houches doesn’t really spring to mind when most people think of the riding around Chamonix. A shame as it’s got some of the best trails. As long as it’s not raining, or you don’t mind the mud.

A quick lap of most of the bike park trail with a wee variation to avoid the mud and road of the lower section warmed us up before heading to the main course of the day, Who’s way.

Spence, who’s ridden pretty much everything in Chamonix, had somehow missed this over the years so Lorne and I were keen to show it off.

It takes a bit of finding, but the clues are there for an amazing, almost 100% singletrack, 1300m descent from the Prarion gondola through Montfort and on to Le Fayet. There’s a few more tyre tracks on it than this time last year which suggests it’s being found a bit more, but so far everyone’s playing nice and not skidding it to death.

After commenting most of the way down how good it was not to be riding against the clock we then discovered we were riding against the clock to get to St Gervais in time for the last tramway. Some hashtagendurotraining later we had a 10 minute wait for the tram and the decision of how to head back to town.

Which, as usual, turned out to be the GR5/Cedric’s favourite trail (allegedly). How had I forgotten how good this trail was? As an added bonus, some work’s been done on the techiest section since the summer deluges, bringing it that bit closer back to being ridable clean (by us, I’m sure Cedric would have nae worries).

Three thousand vertical meters or so of varied and amazing riding all in an afternoon off work. Chamonix, how did I ever doubt you?

Another day and another lunch break, time enough to sample the fun at Flegere on it’s last day. A busy choice with plenty of other folks out on bikes and enjoying the sunshine. One lap down to Les Joux and another to Floria buvette doesn’t sound like much but again, these trails are just so good I was embarrassed to have been neglecting them.

The trail elves have even been out doing some work on the old Flegere DH trail to make it 100% rideable from the Index lift down to the Flegere/Brevent liaison lift and so make the first bit of the descent a bit more interesting than fireroad.

Should it be “Aye Chamonix” or “Chamonix, better together”? Dunno. But I’m looking forward to getting reacquainted

15/09/2014