JKB's Bike Ride

It’s a while since I’ve written anything here!

In fact, it’s a while since I’ve written anything full stop. This will probably be the least action the blog has seen since I started it in 2015 (8 years ago!), but that’s partly because this year has involved the least cycling in quite some time. It’s been a busy year and an active summer, but last year I squeezed in so much two-wheeled adventuring (not to mention the stint working as a courier) that I haven’t felt too hungry to explore more by bike. That said, I couldn’t go the whole summer without one big ride – could I?

So now that I’ve flexed my leg muscles (and they’ve just about recovered now), I can now flex my fingers typing. I’ll start with a quick life-update: The day after I finished the last bikepacking trip (and entry here) – the Old Chalk Way in autumn – I received a job offer from komoot. A wonderful conclusion to a rather wet few days on the bike. Komoot is an app that helps people find adventure, plan routes, navigate whether they’re out cycling or hiking, and then share the trip with friends. An ‘on-brand’ match up, you could say. A dangerous one, too, for someone like myself who frequently loses large chunks of time daydreaming about new places I spot on the map.

Komoot is a fully remote company, with the team spread out across Europe. Every 4 months they get the whole company together somewhere on the continent, for a week working together. When I found out our September ‘Gathering’ would be taking place in the French Alps, an idea began to form.

We’d be staying in a resort near Manigod, which is up in the mountains behind Annecy. On the other side of the mountain – over Col de la Croix Fry – you start nearing the bigger peaks towards Mt Blanc. After I survived my first MTB-bikepacking trips in Scotland & Oman, I started dreaming about a bigger ride deep in the Alps. I came across the Tour des Combins routes on Bikepacking.com, and a sentence in the trail notes captured my imagination: Note that this loop can easily be connected to the most famous Tour du Mont Blanc to create an incredible and challenging bikepacking route.

Back in 2015, when I started my round-the-world ride by pedalling across Europe, I wanted to visit the Alps. I genuinely thought it would be impossible to cycle over them, so I skirted the mountains’ edges. When I rode through Austria I could see the snow-capped peaks in the distance, but that was as close as I dared ride.

When I took part in the Transcontinental Race in 2019, I had no choice but to ride straight through them. Fortunately I was slightly more experienced by then, not to mention riding a considerably lighter setup. On the way I knocked off some of the big classic Alps passes – by this point I’d learnt the word ‘col’ – including Timmelsjoch, Stelvio and Galibier. They were breathtaking. Roads far more epic than I’d known existed in Europe. (As you might have realised: I was never a Tour de France follower!).

The Torino-Nice Rally in 2021 was an opportunity to head deeper into the Alps, ride some more of the famous climbs, but also explore the mountains off-road. Tarmac is convenient, but when a road is paved you’ll never have the same peace-and-quiet. My favourite moments on the TNR were the dirt tracks that led you far from anything else. I didn’t even mind the short hike-a-bike sections, which might in hindsight have been the start of this year’s great escalation.

Those are the rides that led me to this idea: A big figure of eight joining both the TMB and TDC. They are both established hiking routes, and I was well aware that it would involve plenty of hiking – but if I was only going to embark on one trip this year I wanted it to be a biggie. I’d take the bus from Geneva Airport to Chamonix, find somewhere to leave a backpack with my work stuff (with an outfit that would hopefully have me look a respectable human rather than a dishevelled mountain goat), ride both routes, collect the bag and then pedal over to Manigod to meet my colleagues. Easy peasy, right?

I was given one piece of advice. Whatever you do, don’t ride the Tour de Mont Blanc when the UTMB is taking place. Once a year, the Ultra Trail Mont Blanc gets underway in early September. It’s one of the biggest trail running events of the year, and for a week Chamoinix becomes a circus. As it happened, the dates I had in mind meant starting at the very end of this week, but I quite liked the idea of seeing some of the UTMB action in town. Presumably the main race – the 100-miler along the full TMB route – would begin right away and so would have wrapped up earlier in the week. That, in hindsight, was a silly thing to assume.

Aside from the UK train strikes the day I was due to depart (I don’t even want to tell you how expensive that taxi was), the journey was rather painless. The Flix Bus to Chamonix goes straight from Geneva Airport and is pleasantly cheap (given how extortionate that airport is). There was a campsite just down the road from the bus stop in town, with cheap pitches for hikers & cyclists, so I had my tent pitched by dark before wandering down into town.

Chamonix was indeed a circus, but an incredibly charming one. I made my way to the race finish line and watched a few of the finishers from one of the shorter editions. There’s a whole bunch of different races, and it’s a little confusing trying to work out which is which and when they all finish. I struck up conversation with a Vietnamese chap standing next to me, who’d been on the support team for someone due to finish shortly. He told me the 100 mile runners had started a few hours ago, and so the first finishers would be wrapping up early in the afternoon the next day. Ah. And which direction were they running? Anti-clockwise. And which direction was I heading the next day? Clockwise. Of course.

I had a leisurely start the following day, mainly because my tubeless tyre had popped off the rim and I couldn’t get it to re-seat with my small pump. I began with an unexciting search for a bike shop with a track pump I could borrow, before packing up and riding back down to the race finish line to watch a few more finishers come in. I couldn’t be bothered to try and work out what distance they’d been doing. Whatever it was, it would have been staggering.

Like many hiking routes, there are plenty of variations for the TMB. A few people have made adjustments to optimise things for MTB – including those I’d found on Bikepacking.com as well as this one on komoot. By staying down in the valley, I could avoid the runners for most of the morning, and so my TMB kicked off with a shaded ride through the woods north of Chamonix. I was grateful for the cover as it was hot. Despite being in the valley, the trails were hardly flat and I was out of breath in no time at all. I think the altitude might have had something to do with that, although it didn’t occur to me at the time.

Before long it was time to start the first climb up to Col de la Balme and the Swiss border. In theory, this should have been an easy pass to start with – dirt road the whole way up. But I couldn’t ride it. My gears weren’t low enough and I had too much weight on my bike. I was out of breath, sweating in the heat, and it was a long way up to the top. Suddenly I was worrying about my fitness, the fact that I probably had too much stuff on my bike (note: if you are MTB-bikepacking it will always be too much), and questioning my gear ratio. I really wished I had a lower granny to get me up these gradients.

Eventually I got myself up to the top, and blimey – it was stunning. A tiny marker indicated the border, but aside from that there was no reminder that you were crossing from one country into another.

Over Croix de Fer I spotted a runner making their way towards me. I’d finally hit the UTMBers. By this point those poor runners had done about 140 km in around 20 hours. So impressive. Most of them looked wretched but a few remarkably had the energy to smile when I gave them an ‘allez’, ‘vamos’ or ‘you’re doing great’ depending on the nationality on their badge. The traffic wasn’t bad on the high singletrack, and I always stopped to give them a wide berth, but before long I reached a treacherous descent that was far too technical to ride down. Pushing a bike up a mountain is never appealing, but even less so when you don’t get the pleasure of riding down the other side. If a trail is so steep and technical that you can’t even ride down it, then believe me it won’t be much fun walking down it either, even less so with loads of weary trail runners staggering their way up. The dirt road I wanted to join would have taken me away from them, but that was closed due to a landslide so it was a long and tedious descent.

I’d made very little progress on my first day – about 25 km – but that was OK. The slower I was, the less time I’d spend dodging UTMB runners. I stopped for the evening at the municipal campsite in Trient which was really cheap – around £6. I went for a wander and watched the runners trickle in, turning on their head torches as they began the second night-shift of their epic runs. As I slipped into my tent, I left the side ‘door’ open, so that I could watch the flicker of their torches make their way up the mountainside. It was quite a sight, under incredible stars until the moon made its appearance in the early hours. I drifted off to the ‘click click’ sound of trekking poles against tarmac, feeling slightly nervous about the days ahead of me.

Fortunately that was the last of the UTMBers that I’d see. I took a different route in the morning, and by the time I tackled the next climb up to Bovine refuge it was only the race litter-pickers that were left on the trail. That was a blessing, because the next climb was really nasty. Steep enough that I was pushing my front wheel up and over each root and boulder one-by-one, while receiving pitiful looks from the hikers overtaking me. I was starting to think this trip might be more of an upper body workout than my legs.

It was funny to be back in Champex Lac that afternoon. Last May Bella and I house-sat for her uncle’s family in Switzerland. They live nearby, and one day we cycled over to Champex Lac. I was on her aunt’s road bike – desperately trying to get some miles in as training for my upcoming Round Denmark Bike Race – and Bella was on a borrowed e-MTB. We’d stopped at the lake for a dip and an ice cream, before heading down into the valley. It was a great day. In fact, it might even have been a perfect day had Bella listened to my warnings about battery usage and not burnt through it before we got home. That was the day I learnt that cycling eMTBs without electrical support is not particularly fun, especially when you have to ride uphill to get back home.

Champex Lac marked the end of my initial TMB taster. I ditched the official hiking route, and followed the road towards Liddes where I would join the Tour des Combins route. I knew these were hiking routes, and I knew they’d be tough on a hardtail, but man – the last couple of days had been a real sucker-punch and I was feeling winded. I was grateful for some tarmac miles up to Bourg-Saint-Pierre, and for an early stop at a campsite. I wasn’t quite so grateful when the owner charged me £20 for the night (welcome to Switzerland!), but the £4 beer from his fridge was worth every penny.

The next day was a change of scenery, with some fun off-road riding along Lac des Toules, before joining the road up to Col du Grand Saint-Bernard and the Italian border. It was the only paved pass I’d be riding on the TMB/TDC routes and it came at a good moment.

I was also keen to spend as little time in Switzerland as possible. Nothing is cheap there. But when I looked at the map, I realised that the restaurants at the pass might be the last place to resupply until the following evening, so I grabbed a couple of paninis to takeaway (options were rather limited) and set off following the TDC signs. 

Col du Grand Saint-Bernard is one of the oldest routes through the Western Alps. There’s surviving traces of a Roman road, which I joined to descend on the Italian side. At the very top there’s the Great St Bernard Hospice, founded in 1049. The hospice later became famous for its use of St. Bernard dogs in rescue operations, which is why you find dog souvenirs all over the col.

Before long the old Roman track became a singletrack, which then thinned even further and became a little, let’s say ‘spicy’. Nice and narrow with a few good drops to one side. My MTB confidence took a real knock (literally and emotionally) last year when I took a nasty tumble in Spain on the GR249. I’d literally rolled down the side of the mountain in an area where there was no signal, and no humans around at all. So now I was extra cautious, and if in doubt – I’d dismount and walk.

So that’s exactly what I did on one such section. But suddenly my foot slipped off the edge of the path, and the bike fell against me, pushing me downhill. The bike rolled over me, but luckily the hillside wasn’t steep enough to let gravity win. I felt like an idiot. It was almost a carbon copy of my accident last year, even though I’d taken the sensible option and walked. I knew I was a terrible mountain biker, but was I a useless walker as well!?

I dragged my bike up and inspected the damage. Bicycle: fine. Me: fine. Well, mostly – but I’d taken two good divots out of my right leg (probably from pedal spikes). Nothing too serious, but there was plenty of blood flowing and I obviously had no plasters or first aid kit with me. You’d have thought I might have learnt from last year, but alas. I used up my wet wipes to clean up, and put on a brave face. It had happened at an unfortunate spot, just at the start of a really mean hike to get up to a double track road. Safe to say I wasn’t having the best of afternoons.

Eventually my mood brightened when I reached a balcony dirt road that was perfectly rideably and refreshingly flat. Everything was stunning – big mountain vistas, blue skies, tiny farmhouses in the most picturesque spots you could possibly imagine living such a lifestyle. This Italian side of the Alps had a distinctly different feel to the French and Swiss parts. Less polished, more rustic and definitely not all set up for tourists. I saw a farmer muster his cattle back to their home for the night, and aside from that I didn’t see a soul the rest of the day. Not even a single hiker. I found a secluded spot to camp in the woods, realised with glee that it was my first wild camp of 2023, and added PLASTERS to my shopping list before I called it a night.

The following morning I reached a section I’d been both nervous and excited about: the Via Ferrata. That’s how I’ve seen it described, but I’m not well enough versed in this stuff to know what actually counts as a Via Ferrata. All I knew is that they are routes in the Alps that have steel fixtures like cables and railing that climbers can hold or clip into so they don’t fall to their death. There were two short sections of this that I’d need to manoeuvre, but others had already done it by bike so I figured they couldn’t be too bad…

The first was a strange gap through some rocks that required squeezing the bike through in an upright position. I made an awkward scramble to get in front of the bike, before letting the front wheel drop down once I reached the exit. As I did so, the tyre grazed my injury from yesterday and opened up the wound again. Somehow it bled even more this time. I used my hands to stop the blood dripping all over my shoes, having used up the last of my wet wipes. By the time it stopped I looked like I’d amputated my own leg. Blood rubbed all down my shin and on my hand. I’m glad no one saw me until I found a stream to wash off in.

The second section was slightly more precarious, requiring some careful balancing of the bike, but soon I was back on pleasant dirt roads. Just in time for the highest pass of the trip: Fenetre de Durand, marking the Italian/Swiss border at 2,804m. It was, inevitably, a long hike to the top – but somehow this one felt worth it. The landscape was otherworldly, totally exposed. At the summit I could see glaciers stopping in their tracks coming down the mountainside. I was reminded of plenty of landscapes that I’ve cycled around the world, but none from Europe. It’s easy to forget that we have places like this in this continent.

The descent was a real rollercoaster. Singletrack past old mines, before a double track road took me down to Lac de Mauvoisin from Chanrion refuge. Beyond the reservoir there was a wild tunnel through the mountainside that was an eerie section, and then I was back onto tarmac marking my return to Swiss civilisation. I rolled into another extortionate campsite, weary but buzzing from such a varied day.

I was feeling like I’d found some rhythm after 4 days. I thought my daily distances were so incredibly conservative that I’d be deliberately slowing down, but actually around 40 km on that terrain felt about right. It was all starting to feel a little more doable. That said, I decided to treat myself to some tarmac miles and skip the third (and final) pass on the TDC route. Following the valley road was longer, but would be much faster. It would mean that I could have a leisurely morning, actually cover some proper ground, and arrive back on the TMB route feeling fresh.

It was funny riding down the valley. Before long I was in the same places Bella and I had explored last summer. Eventually I reached the road leading up to Verbier, at the bottom of which was our – temporarily last summer – local grocer. It’s always odd to cycle through somewhere familiar in such different circumstances, when your life is reduced to tent-based roaming without any real idea where you’ll end up for the night.

By the afternoon I was back in Orsieres, beneath Champex Lac, and back on the TMB route. I wrapped up the day in La Fouly, and I’ll wrap up this blog here as well. I was halfway, and back on the Tour de Mont Blanc route again…