Chamonix Bike Blog

Tag: whistler

  • B.C. Pemberton, Squamish and Chilcotins, I don’t only ride park.

    There is a lot of space in B.C. and this is only a wee bit of it.

    Following on from the part 1 post on the trip to British Columbia, here’s some envy inducing images from our trips away from mountain bike Disney Land to some other choice spots.

    Whistler’s park is famous for a reason, but then the rest of B.C. is also famous for a reason. I could’ve probably spent 3 weeks riding Squamish and come home thinking I’d had a grand trip. There’s a lot of amazing riding out there and I’ve hardly seen any of it, but I suspect I’ll be seeing more over the next few years.

    None of this would have happened without Rob and his friends taking us on roadtrips away from Whistler and lending out assorted gear and advice so I raise a craft IPA/fizzy French lager to y’all in gratitude and hope I can repay the favour in Chamonix at some point. Cheers also to Lorne for doing most of the organising and logistics for the trip, and taking the better photographs!

    Here’s some pictures and pretention that I scribbled down at the time in the absence of a coherent write up on 3 weeks riding.

    Elbows out on "Boney Elbows" Squamish.

    I’m a little confused by Rob and Andy’s chat of “a good climbing trail”. Normally this is called a chairlift. Here in Pemberton it seems to be a flowing trail cut up the hill. It is a pleasant enough way gain height for sure, but a little frustrating not to just push straight up through the zig zags and gain height with speed an efficiency.

    B.C. verses France I guess.

    For the afternoon we swap pedalling for shuttling in Rob’s F150 truck. The 19 year old V8 behemoth makes it hard to take the moral high ground on e-bikes, but when you’re lapping a trail as fun as Reserectum the moral high ground is a mute point.

    B.C. verses France.

    Lorne dropping onto the dustbowl of "Glue Factory", somewhere between getting stung by hornets and Rob trashing his wheel.

    There used to be a trail called “One trick pony”. Then the forest got harvested and the trail destroyed. From the dust arose “Glue Factory”.

    As a group of 7 we drop in in roughly guessed order of speed. After 30 seconds Rob stops at the start of the clear cut. ‘Reet good that. J.P. and Joe arrive to similar comments. Lorne arrives swatting himself and complaining about having been stung.
    We look up the hill.
    The screaming starts.
    Ali and Esther are busy being engulfed by a swarm of hornets we’d disturbed.

    The group continues for another 30 seconds of trail. ‘Reet good etc. etc.

    Rob arrives, compresses out of a turn and superman front flips off the trail into the clear cut debris about 3 meters below. Somehow he’s completely unscathed but his four ride old rear wheel is toast. Or taco.

    What’ll the next 30 seconds bring?

    It’s about 7pm, the sun is going down behind the truck cab, behind the three bikes on the tailgate, behind the hills. Beck’s ‘Loser’ is on the radio and we’re taking the piss out of each other after obscenely good day’s riding in Squamish. This is one of the best bits of biking, and the hardest to capture or explain.

    The Chilcotins are so far removed from Whistler bike park it's hard to grasp that it's part of the same sport, done with the same bikes. Rob takes the backcountry chairlift up Ridge-O-Rama.

    Yesterday we saw Momma Grizzly and her 3 cubs crossing the road. This was cool because they were 75m away and we had Rob’s dirty great truck to hide in if they headed our way.

    Today, I’m leading out above the treeline. The trail’s traversing below the summit of a mountain I never found the name of. I see a load of fresh earth ahead but, being a veteran of many an alpine trail, clock it as a freshly fallen small landslide and keep going.
    I notice the landslide starts from just above the trail. Odd. I keep going.
    I notice the landslide has a great big hollow as its start point. I keep going.
    I notice the landslide has bear shit all over it. I stop.
    Shit.
    I appear to have ridden straight up to a grizzly’s hibernation den. Rob then arrives with the key thing that Goldielocks never had. Bear spray.

    Just Momma grizzly and her 3 cubs crossing the road, nothing to see here. Canada eh.

    It’s not a new complaint, but generally the best biking doesn’t get photographed. Who wants to stop mid-train as you slide down some new best trail ever with ridiculous scenery and colours around you. Aye it’d make a grand photo but that’s not worth killing the moment for. And that’s before you start with the issue that the photo only illustrates the moment, it doesn’t include the climb to the trail, the atmosphere, the enjoyment of the trail up to this point and the anticipation of the trail still to come

    Hence, there are very few photos to illustrate just how good the Chilcotan combination of Hightrail-Molly Dog-Pepper Dog-Kens Trail is (and it might be the best 1000m vert of singletrack I’ve ridden) but you can extrapolate from the scenery shots of the climb, the pictures from Ridge-o-rama and Cinnabar the day before, and your own memories of that. time. when.

    There weren't many photos taken on out way down High Trail, but this kinda conveys the idea pretty well. Alltimefalltime sums it up.

    As I might have mentioned, there’s bears out there. Riding into a bear would be a bad thing, so to minimise the chances of this you start a little chant of “hey bear” as you approach blind corners, thick shrubs and the like. This rises to “HEY BEAR!”  as you get faster.

    At first I wondered if it evolves a Pavlovian response in the bear, instead of the ringing of a bell getting the saliva going the sound of our anti-bear call would actually get Yogi ready for a 70kg snack. I’m now wondering if I’VE got the association conditioning, where whenever I’m riding a grand trail I’ll start yelling “hey bear” to the confusion (and possible consternation) of French hikers.

    Little Rob getting his freeride on high in the Chilcotins.

    I’m not sure I’ve really conveyed the awesomeness of this trip, and to be honest I don’t really need to. You either want to go to B.C. or you don’t, this page isn’t going to influence you either way. I’m glad I went, I want to go back, but I’m also pretty happy to be living where I am with all the Chamonix trails on my doorstep, and the infinite choices spreading out from there. Squamish, Finale, Pemberton, Verbier, Chilcotins, Aosta. There’s not much to whinge about there.

    See you next trip everyone, cheers!

    Lorne near the start of Ridge-O-Rama. Some trail names are inventive and original, others less so...

     

  • B.C. Whistler, I only ride park.

    Do you even drift bro?

    British Columbia is mountain biking. The sport might have been born (kind of) in Marin County USA, but it grew up and had kids in B.C. If you want to get an idea of the benchmarks in biking, and to see what’s behind all the shiny images in most mtb media, you have to take a trip to B.C.

    I finally took a trip to B.C., travelling over with Lorne and meeting up with assorted friends from Chamonix and the UK. It was, as expected, amazing. The trails, the biking culture, the infrastructure and the space were everything the internet had told me they’d be and some.

    All of this made for a great trip, and I can’t thank my friends, the folks I met and the trail builders enough for it.

    What it didn’t make for though, is a great blog post. It’s not even going to scrape through as an average blog post. Three weeks is a long time to either remember everything that happened, or condense everything that happened. There’s far too many varied experiences to try my usual crutch of finding a random fact that interests me and writing around it without missing most of the trip, and far too much material to just write about the whole trip in an even remotely interesting way.

    Instead I’ve channeled my inner Partridge and, by scribbling notes during the trip, have managed to drag this out to two posts, one for Whistler and one for not Whistler, of random bits and bobs that happened to space the photos. I’d focus on the photos.

    This is the Whistler one:

    Rob showing the way where, really, there isn't a way. Cheers Rob!

    With an 18 month build up to getting here, the stress and anticipation of a day or so dragging 60kg of luggage around planes, trains and automobiles & a healthy dose of jetlag…..the first lap was always going to be an anti-climax.

    Lorne was obviously keen to start on a grand trail. Not too hard to ease us in, but fun riding, and with his experiences from last year had been set on “Crank it up” for a whiles. It’s not that it was a bad trail, far from it, just between the wheel sized craters in the berms and my struggle to get the speed for the jumps I got to the bottom of the hill a bit “meh”.

    The second trail was a different story. We’re on blue velvet and, at this point, Lorne is leading out. The trail arcs almost 180 degrees right on a dirt wall of a berm, straight into a second berm, the mirror of the previous. As I look round the corner to see what’s coming up next I see Lorne fade out of sight, slightly sideways in the air, with the accompanying giggle. At this point I get park.

    The park chairlifts are pretty sociable, if you’re lapping on your own but want company it doesn’t take long to meet someone to ride with.

    Heading up the Garbo chair I get chatting to Gary, who is riding a bike that looks like a session. Because it’s a session. I ask how Freight Train is riding, I’ve not ridden it yet and my first lap down jump trails is always…entertaining….as I try and get my speed right.

    A couple minutes later, 52 year old Gary is leading out down Freight Train and giving me a tow into each kicker. Seems there’s plenty of time left to get better in the air.

    I'm not saying the park is ALL about A-Line, but it's all about A-line.

    Top of the World, TOTW, is apparently a “must do” when you’re in Whistler. A must do despite being an extra 20$ for a short chairlift to access one trail much like all the trails Chamonix has off all lifts above the tree line. I digress. The TOTW trail is fun enough, but the best reason for going up there with a bike is to then get into the trails like Khyber, Babylon, Ride don’t Slide. All of these used to be accessed by a long push up the hill, but now for a mere $20 you can ride a fun enough trail into them.

    We were stopped for photos about half way down the TOTW trail when one of Rob’s bike patrol colleagues passed us and said he was going to be needed. A couple minutes down the trail a rider was receiving CPR. His friends, assorted stopped riders and the bike patrol worked, for over an hour, to keep Derrick’s blood and oxygen moving around his body whilst arranging for helicopter transport from the mountain to hospital. After he’d been carried into the helicopter and the area tidyed back up we continued on to Khyber, Upper Babylon, See colours and puke and other classics, my first rides of “real” B.C. trails instead of bike park, followed by a BBQ.

    The next day we found out Derrick had died of a heart attack. Sometimes the world is shit.

    https://nsmb.com/articles/memoriam-derrick-rockhill/

    Ride don’t Slide is a bit of a pedal and push away from the park when TOTW isn’t open. I’m on my own in old growth forest with no human sounds other than the tick of my freehub. I start thinking about bears and cougars.

    The bears seem sufficiently vegetarian however the cougars are more of a concern. Several folk have told me you only see a cougar when it wants you to see it, seeing a cougar is fine, it’s when you can’t see the cougar you have to worry.

    I can’t see any cougars.

    There’s a lot to be said for countries where you’re the top of the food chain, but this trail is good enough to beat that argument.

    It’s damp out. Make a cup of tea, have a sandwich, and put on waterproofs.

    Shady acres into Del Bocca Vista in Whistler hero dirt is as good as it gets. Renegade in Whistler humidity, is not.

    I’d love to know what freak of geological nature makes Whistlers dirt so tacky in the wet, ‘cos it’d be great to get that sorted in Chamonix. The rock is just as slick though.

    There’s a word to describe the feeling of realising for the last 350m of climbing you’ve been on the wrong trail. And there’s no other trail cutting across to where you want to be, And there’s no alternative descent from where you are. And logging service road back to the trail head to start anew the 600m climb is your only option.

    There’s a word for this feeling, but I don’t know what it is…