I’ve moved my mountain bike related blogging activities to
http://www.endoftheride.com
It seems more relevant!
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May 27th, 2009
The new bikes have arrived! They look unbelievably “bling”. I have been lucky enough to have this day in May for 8 years now. It’s one of the best bits of the job. This year we have a 16″ and an 18″ Orange Alpine 160.
I thought I’d pull the “prototype to this bike out of the garage and make some compare and contrast notes. Apart from the component differences there are a number of obvious frame differences.
May 10th, 2009
I’ve just got back from a few days in Finale Ligure, Italy, I first visited about 18 years ago as a climber. I haven’t been back since. Carl and Sian had been there a few times with their mountain bikes and talked highly of it. It happened that a bank holiday weekend coincided with a trip they were doing down there so we took the family down with all the bikes and camping stuff. It ended up being quite a party because Sara, Guy and Phil from FlowMTB where there for a few days too. Thankfully the weather was good so I was able to abandon the family on a couple of the days and go for a ride with all of them. Carl was guiding and this is what he showed us. Roman Bridges (Ponti Romani), 27km, 40/60 singletrack/otherstuff This was super convenient as it virtually left from the campsite, it involved a complete mix of the riding and terrain found in the area and included a singletrack perched above the sea and sandy beaches. This is fairly close to riding heaven for me.
Caprazoppa, 8km, 70/30 This starts off with a hot grunt out of town to the hilltop west of Finale, here there is a church and a café (if it’s open), we managed to upset the café owner, when we arrived at 1220 the café was closed, we decided to make use of the tables and chairs to stuff down a couple of Mule Bars and take in the scenery, the owner then turned up and let us know that he wasn’t too impressed. A shame as we had wanted to give him some of our cash! From there it is pretty much 100% singletrack back down to the valley bottom, some of this was just a little hairy for this early in the season! La Briga, 6km, 50/50 After pizza’s and salad in town we road climbed up to Manie, we caught up with a couple of Americans on hire bikes out for a gentle ride, I only saw the back side of a silver haired guy riding in flipflops, a dropped back and rode with his wife which I could just about manage, considering that her son is Geoff Banks this means she is pretty much old enough to be my Mum, ouch. Anyway, the descent was pretty much all smooth singletrack followed by a few hundred metres of cobbled path to finish in the town. Brilliant.
So all in all a brilliant few days, makes me think about endlessride doing some mtb trips down there after the Morzine mountain bike season is over. It’ll have to be in late September or October and will obviously involve a hotel and some local guides, though it looks like the hunting season would impact on this.
You can buy the Blu Bike guide from the local shops and the local 1:25,000 map “Alp cartoguide 2″. May 5th, 2009
RideMorzine is back online - it has a new TLD of .org. Lets see what happens with it! April 27th, 2009
The annual end of season ski randonee (ski mountaineering) race was held in Avoriaz yesterday. There are 4 courses (Elite, Grand, Petit, Mini), Francesca Eyre and I entered the Grand (1400m of ascent) and Lee and Sian entered the Petit (1000m of ascent). The results were: Francesca and Gareth 2hrs 7min (last year 2hrs 18min). Lee and Sian 2hrs 3min (last year 2 hrs 11min), they’d have been 5minutes quicker if they had actually made it to the start line on time! Full results can be found on the CAF Morzine website. April 6th, 2009
Les Gets (Chavannes and Mt Chery lift) will be opening a week early for mountain bikes on weekends only from May 30th until June 19th. And then from then on full time. Goodness knows how, there is more than a normal amount of snow about at the moment! Looks like the “main” lifts will be open June 26th until the August 30th. This came from the Chatel webpage. Endlessride still has room at the in too. April 5th, 2009
This ski tour is described as a “classic” in the local guide book and rightly so. It’s described on camp to camp and ski tour. It’s fairly long (for me!), the first ascent is 1300m up the Tete de Bostan, followed by a descent of 100m to the col de Bostan, we did start up towards the Pas au Taureau (2555m) but were thawted by a steep section that had semi avalanched. It was very warm and had not frozen much overnight so we left it alone and headed up towards the Pointe de la Golette, which is best described at the “Dents Blanche”. In fact the Dents Blanche correctly refers to the whole chain. We stopped short of the summit. The top slope had caught the sun and looked like nasty skiing, plus we’d left Carl and Sara back at the col. The top bowl (now named snowshoe bowl after the lone, shorts wearing, very speedy snowshoer that was doing a good job at out pacing all the skiers on the hill that day (there was us 4 and one other)) contained some fair powder, after we picked up Carl and Sara (who would have waited, they seemed very content in the sun, out of the wind) we managed to get some good spring turns before we hut the rotten porridge further down. We stopped for a little while at the winter refuge next to the Refuge Bostan-Tornay, skins on again for a rising traverse back to the normal route. In total about 1600m of ascent. We set off at 8am and were back at the Crapahute at 3pm. The map with the route marked on can be seen here.
There are loads of ski resources for the area here. March 29th, 2009
You’ve probably heard it before but my main job is helping to sell chalets in the Haute Savoie. I run the back room for a team of 11 people that work for Alpine Property. I’ve done a new blog that links in with this. Click here to alpine chalets and apartments! |
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