The greater Le Tour area

The last day of June must be spent riding footpaths

Despite the Mont Blanc marathon being on, it wasn't going to stop us riding at le Tour.

Or the guide (who I had actually transfered a few weeks before) trying to tell us off for riding a trail, he was actually very nice, but once I mentioned a lack of arrete municipal he seemed a little put back and gave up arguing. (please let me know if you know any official word otherwise on le tour trails)

The lower downhill track has a few nice new berms, and a few completely random new berms. So one lap down was enough.

We headed to Catogne area to cruise the turns and flow before nipping left and back towards Vallorcine. Just above the tete de la Balme chair is a wonderful meadow, where I did some impromptu flower Identification (still got lots to learn for my IML).

Catogne should look like this, but there is still snow to the left of the buildings

I was interested to drop down to Vallorcine to see what was going on, the lifties everywhere had told us the DH course was shut. So down the 4x4 track, but luckily for us mountain bikers, the singletrack footpath the goes from near the end of the downhill course is now mandatory for everyone to take. GREAT! though the two girls on hardtails pushing down it probably didn't enjoy as much as us. It was wet in there from the previous days heavy rain and as ever you can really hit some dangerous section's with more speed and end up on poor lines. Well atleast I did... as my downhill bike skipped all over the place underneath me.

After a coke zero stop we headed up. Don't forget the lift closes for lunch, but we'd timed it pretty well. From heading up, the work that has been done so far seems to be in a field just outside of the village, and maybe some minor alterations to home run 4x4 track. We didn't have time to come down the DH track, but I'd like to guess you could probably ride most of it. However I'm not sure how much of the other pistes have been altered as it looked like a section had been done nearer the top of the lift station, towards where the wooden drop used to be that lead into the 'jump' section of the DH trail.

The official word according the deviation is that they are working on a reservoir or piping for drinking/household water. It did however say "plan de Envers". This could of course be a generic name given to an area, but it reminded me of the Valley Blanche ski variant.

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