Well this contains retro thoughts and retrograde fears.
Other family are arriving at Geneva at midnight and will need to be picked up. So yesterday for our DH fun we head to Leysin, halfway to Geneve. Gorgeous drive up through unfeasibly green meadows and scattered ancient chalets. Leysin is a lovely village which we know well and like many places have begun the adaptation to bike culture. Parking is easy and cheap in the main lift car park, and dotted around are dusty, ragged DH-ers on rather nice rigs. Promising. Although we have skied here we have not done the summer DH runs.
Bikes lifted onto the chairs and up we go, doing the relaxing drift up the hill. Lovely. There’s a red, a blue, a red and a black with very large ramp drop-offs, visible from the chair as we ascend.
After a gentle off load into cool air we have absolutely no idea where the blue is. So we head left and over to a rippling blue lake and through a signed break in the fencing. The Grom promptly dives off the fire road and onto a thin straight, vertiginous rocky path which is clearly one of the shortcuts which others have cut and he loves to follow. This looks cool but runs faster and faster and faster and the loose rocks in the path get larger and larger until they are all fist sized and very plentiful. I reach the normal point where you begin to lose vision from the vibration, and have an interesting excursion to the right but get it all back together again. I pull up next to the Grom at the bottom. ‘How did you find that’ say I. It’s reassuring that he says ‘fffing terrifying, but fun’.
The next 500m is sinuous rut but again full of fist sized rocks, which makes a potentially cool section bloody sketchy. There are two foot drops offs which normally are a Great Pleasure but they all terminate in cobblestone-filled landings. Yeargh.
The next section of red has a gate entrance which describes the features and level. Fine for the Grom, but I need to be driver, builder, ferry-person and general able-bodied dogs body. So I bail and take the chicken run down. I wait at the bottom station and the Grom appears with a big grin. ‘Er….’ He says ‘…glad you bailed on that one, there’s a near vertical section into a series of four big drop offs…there’s no recovery time between them and if you screw up you are sort of … buggered’. We go up again.
Grom snake bites the rear - we run a thick tube in the rear of his Canyon Sender and tubeless on the front. Quick set of patches and some efficient reassembly get him running.
The day basically falls into a pattern. Good trails on which the rubble fairies have done their nightly work with alpine dumper trucks and loaded nice trails with scary scary rubble. The Grom circulates and loves it. I teeter down with DEEP FEAR, which is no good at all. You need SPPPPPPEEEEEEED when things get really loose and vertical. So I just resign myself to a day doing chicken runs on the fire roads, practising my flat corners at speed while the Grom gets dusty and tired. It’s fine….some days work differently to others, and I was going fast and confidently at Crans and St Luc in previous days…ego intact.
I wait for a while in the shade outside the big bike shop near the lifts and have a great discussion with a young guy originally from Squamish who now works in Leysin winter skiing and summer biking - whose parents took over the mountain skills teaching at the Leysin American School from John Harlin Jr. Most people of my retro-age know that Harlin Snr and Dougal Haston were sensational climbers of the 60’s and Haston is buried in plot 2242 at Leysin (id 6939823). Unmarked by name, since burial plots are scarce in the Alps and are only for 20 years or so, until someone else needs it.
We end when the lifts close and strip off armour and dust, leaving the armour spread out on the tarmac around the car to dry out - a bit. By now the village is empty and quiet. The ambient hum and clank of the lifts have ceased. We are tired and happy. We both laugh at the red O ring on the WC Boxxers - which is very much right at the top - all 200mm of travel used today.
There’s a lovely bar just down the hill for beers and relaxation. Then a descent to the hotel in Le Sepey for fantastic Rosti - one of the best combinations of potato, cheese and meat which you can find. Vegans look away - Grom had steak rosti. Very carefully cooked and prepared. We are first in at 6pm and by 7pm the place is humming. We take a dusk walk amongst the bats and dark chalet, find the rifle range and talk about life and seemingly endless days….
Nice. One to remember.
