New Trails Galore! Sunny Side Up, Scary Bear Trail, The Magic Carpet and The Big Cheese:
We have been busy! Two new monster epics and a couple of smaller (by BV standards!) new offerings with still more on the cards before the season starts.
Sunny Side Up: “Why Monsieur BikeVillage, wiz all theese new trails you are reelly spoiling us!” That's right, yet another cracking newbie for 2008. Sunny Side Up marks a bit of a BV trail renaissance on the 'other' side of the valley (the sunny side, hence the name). An amazing, if occasionally airy, 3km pine woodland traverse leading into a savage set of switchbacks which spill down the mountainside for 900 vertical metres before depositing us unceremoniously at the valley bottom, grinning.
Scary Bear Trail: It almost came into being last summer but ended up on hold – this summer sees the unveiling of the Scary Bear Trail. Only a quickie but definitely a goodie, it provides another cool singletrack route from Bourg back towards Landry. Really rhythmic, flowing stuff with a mad backdrop of Landry beneath us. Just don't stop and speak to any of the stuffed bears en-route..!
The Big Cheese is the culmination of 8 years research by Sam and puts the B into backcountry adventures. Featuring a shoulder up to a stunning alpine col only about two metres wide, it's a real mountainbiking classic (see the photo on the home page).
The Magic Carpet (above) is the brainchild of Mungo, who spent all of 2007 obsessing over it. After endless days spent hiking through bracken and watching seemingly beautiful singletrack end at cliff tops he finally cracked an amazing route from the top of one of the peaks, 2550m up in La Plagne, all the way down to the valley floor in Moutiers, some 1950m below, from where we get the train back home! The singletrack is incredibly flowing and seems to meander up above the tree line forever before dropping into some more techie stuff in the woods below.
The name came about when Sam and Steve went to ride the trail in October but decided to add an extra twist of adventure by staying in a refuge near to the top and hitting the trail at dawn. Alas the refuge was shut and we spent a cold night at 2400m sleeping in some scraps of carpet that had been left in the mud outside the refuge! Luckily we'd brought some matches and found some wood to burn or it might have all gone a bit Joe Simpson... Anyway, thanks to the carpets and the super-flowing nature of the trail (and a suggestion by Mugs from MTB Wales – cheers buddy!), we thought the Magic Carpet was just right as a name.
StrathPuffer Madness!
A
24hr race in northern Scotland in winter? Yes please! Team
BikeVillage (Sam, Stu, Frosty and Mungo) turned up with a
Mongolian yurt and a lot of pies and somehow managed to come 2nd
in the 4 man team event. Conditions were hilarious – 100km/h
winds on the eve of the event blew away the race headquarters
(seriously!) and every tent that had so far gone up. The only way
into or out of the campsite was on the end of a rope pulled by a
tractor and the 7ish mile loop had at least one mile of sheet ice.
Studded tyres were of great help ;-)
Anyhow, we soon had the Yurt up to about 30 degrees and so spent the whole weekend, aside from our little forays on the bikes, in blissful warmth. No wonder Ghengis went so far. Far harder men than us were Neil and Gordon, winners of the men's pairs event with almost the same number of laps as us weedy four managed. The good news for them was that they won a holiday with BikeVillage for their efforts. The funny news was that Neil was already booked for 2008 so now Sam owes him his deposit back!
Big thanks go out to Steve and all the Square Wheels team who put on the event. A right home-style atmosphere prevailed throughout and we'll definitely be back next year for some more terrible weather and good laughs.
Easyjet summer flights now online:
Yes indeed, Easyjet have released their summer schedule and the flights are officially skanky-cheap. Those aren't old Stelios' words, by the way ;-) Anyhow, now is a great time to book your trip and get a deal on flights.
BikeVillage tops MBR's best 52 biking photos ever!
Not exactly super-recent but pretty enough so who cares?! With last March's MBR came a CD featuring the 'best 52 biking photos ever'. We at BikeVillage are more than a smidge proud to say the 3 of them were taken with us on our trails!
On the left is a nadgery wee traverse towards Sketchy Dismount, with Alliet and the north face of Bellecote (just) in the background. In the middle is a night ride up by Notre Dame des Vernettes, taken during a lights test. Finally, the shot on the right is a savagely cheeky climb beneath the Col d'Entreporte. It was taken in October, hence the beautiful colour of all the larch trees around the trail. With such fame coming our way, it's surely only a matter of time before we make it into the 'spotted' pages of Heat magazine ;-)
e-mail us on info@bikevillage.co.uk or call/fax us on 020 8906 2146