On August 6, 2017, we began a 6 day mountain bike trip with Alps Mountain Bike Guide Company starting in the amazing, adorable, adventure wonderland of Chamonix, France and ending in Zermatt Switzerland.  The trip was tough and included lots of steep climbing and hike-a-bikes and super technical descents, but it was super fun.  The weather not always kind or  forgiving, but the scenery, food and little towns that we would have never visited otherwise were awesome! Apologies as this post is not full of bike porn pics,  but mostly scenery, buildings, etc. BUT as soon they’re up, I’ll add links to Dave’s GoPro footage of the mountain biking for the day here, as well as one or two of the videos I took that day, which I will post on my YouTube channel:

AND, you can also check out my  super cool “relive” video using this link:  https://www.relive.cc/view/1125284379

On Day 4 we woke up early enough to walk around and take pix of Grimentz, Switzerland.  Loved it. (I put most of them in the Day 3 post, though).

Here’s us leaving the B&B that we stayed at:

As you can see, the morning was dreary

The weather DID clear up fairly quickly though! The ride started out with climbing technical singletrack, a lift, and doing a bit more hike-a-bike up to the border of the Francophone side of Switzerland into the German-speaking side of Switzerland.

The guys joked that we all trained all wrong for this trip as we should’ve included much more hike-a-bike in our training…then we visualized hiking our bike everywhere we went, including the bathroom, etc.  pretty funny stuff..

We stopped at a little farmhouse to eat our lunch but didn’t realize that someone actually lived there!  She poked her head out of the window and offered us coffee! super nice, and she spoke both French and German…

Then came the super steep switchbacks on a technical downhill.  Some sections were so rocky! I actually clipped out in the rocky section to catch myself and as I clipped out,  I slammed my ankle into the side of a rock hidden in underbrush HARD.  OW.  clipping out the rest of the day hurt so badly! My ankles are usually pretty skinny and bony! Not this one, not this time….

Below is the group waiting on the slower ones:

During the downhill, the woman who was close to my speed and her boyfriend hung back and worked on skills as they came down, whereas I was just bombing it and trying to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, all helter-skelter-like.

In the following days I definitely wish I would’ve done the same thing and focused on improving my skills more, because it just got more and more technical, though mostly due to the weather conditions,  and I really needed to have better technique.

Following all that downhill was the “forever climb” to Unterbach….  this was a LONG, 10 hour, almost 5,000 feet ascent, day and the most we could do is clean up, eat, and sleep afterwards….oh, and ice my poor ankle.

We didn’t explore Unterbach at all, although it didn’t look like it was half as adorable as the previous towns, so it was just as well.