Tall Tales is a collection of our favourite crazy bike-related stories from our favourite riders, racers and industry legends.
Everyone has that story that they wait until the end of the night to pull out when the anecdotal oneupmanship starts to get into the final round. Tall Tales is a collection of our favourite bike-related stories from the best in the business.
Tall Tales this week comes to you from Manon Carpenter, involving laps of Verbier bike park and getting caught out in the open by some ramblers…
Words and photos by Manon Carpenter.
To be honest, I’m generally a fan of keeping things relatively under control. These days I get most of my kicks from big days out, venturing somewhere a little further afield and ideally involving a wild swim wherever possible. One particularly good trip which pushed the comfort zone and left us (myself and my partner, Christian – a relative newbie to MTB) with huge grins and satisfaction was an impromptu overnight trip to the top of a mountain in Switzerland, in summer 2018.
The Alps are a staple destination for a lot of UK MTBers, and I’d heard Tracy Moseley comment many times how Verbier was one of her favourite places to ride. Having only ridden there once maybe when I was younger, it was time to go and check it out properly. Tracy kindly put me in touch with Lucy and Phil from Bike Verbier, who highlighted the bike park’s best bits and also told us about a ride on the mountain opposite, taking in the Col de Mille.
To skip a few bits, at the end of our second full day of bike park blasting (which was brilliant), we planned to catch the final shuttle bus, which can take bikes up the first few hundred metres of road, then climb the remaining ~900m to the Col de Mille at 2500m, spend the night up top and enjoy the descent in the morning. We knew there was a refuge at the top but we had no way of contacting them and I don’t think we knew for sure that they would even be open, so we packed our sleeping bags into our highly non-sophisticated, definitely-not bike-packing-backpacks, just in case we were in for a night sleeping outside the refuge’s front porch.
At the end of the day in the bike park, some drama including a puncture and a big crash from Christian which left me waiting at the bottom of the trail getting quite worried what had happened to him. He eventually appeared with a ripped top, broken peak and a hurting hand. I say I like things to be relatively under control, but a lot of my life does actually end up being quite a hectic rush.
Hurrying back to the car park we packed sleeping bags, cooked pasta to take with us for dinner, a can of beer for Christian and everything else that might possibly be needed. Including, of course, my camera.
We got to the bus just in time, caught our breath on the way up to 1600m and then got spat out at the top of an alpine road to figure out where to go next. We had an idea, either on a map or at least on a phone, and way signs in the Alps are very helpful. The climb was a mix of singletrack and pretty brutal, steep fire road sections. After the last fire road it was a slog across bumpy, boggy pasture and in the distance we could see a final kick. The last 100m, as the crow flies, was made up of 10 hike-a-bike switchbacks which gained 100m elevation. It was steep…
Legs burning, we made it to the refuge and it was open with spare beds. Hallelujah. We didn’t have to ride back down in the dark or sleep outside in the nippy 2500m high mountain air, both of which were backup plans. We booked our beds, wrapped up in our many emergency layers and went to watch the moody sunset.
The next morning was beautiful. We’d brought pretty basic breakfasts with us, so we ate and then set off down the grassy, sunlit slopes. The descent was fantastic, even with our huge backpacks and stopping early on to take in the views. Halfway down we found a lake which needed swimming in, and a mountain view with a rock that needed to be stood on to dry off and pose, in Christian’s case, naked.
We could be forgiven for thinking we were alone, it being early in the morning and us having made the ascent the night before. Alas, after Christian had been stood on the rock for some time we became aware of a group of ~30 older female hikers making their way across the valley towards us, who had definitely been there long enough to witness Christian in his naked glory. I buried myself into the bank of the lake in hysterics as Christian hurried barefoot back to the safety of clothing. I think they all found it quite amusing.
The rest of the descent carried on and on, a total of 1650m descent in total, through grassy meadows and steep, uninterrupted wooded singletrack. We got back down to the valley floor in time for lunch, very ready for more food and sweltering in the midday heat. Satisfied by an adventure that very much lived up to expectation, we made our way to food and eventually over the Great St. Bernard to Pila, Aosta, ready for the next one, feeling very much that bikes are brilliant.
