Crans Montana

Probably not quite up to the hype, but that's coming from a crew who have the best parks in Europe to choose from...

We headed over to Crans Montana to ride the lifts before they close down.  We'd all heard a lot of good things over the years about Crans Montana so were keen to check it out.

A winding road lead us up to a lovely south facing Valais mountain side.  The village of Crans is very smart. A classic Swiss style resort, caviar shopping anyone? 

Problem struck when we tried to park at the lift station carpark and were stopped by a security guard.  There was a Jeep 4x4 day taking place and it started at the lifts carpark.  The problem was that the security guard didn't know where to send us to park.  Not very Swiss. And also not very Swiss was the large free carpark we found for the day!

The first run we did was down the Red trail.  We stopped quite soon into to rest our arms due to the braking bumps and loose surface.  What have we let ourselves into I thought. Another lap and the trail flowed better despite not quite knowing how grippy the washed out berms were. Drift and hope was the way to do it.

Before stopping for lunch we thought we best check out the black run, a trail used for IXS European Downhill racing.  It should be good, if not crazy.  It was steep, it was committing and there were some huge root gardens, huge rock rolls and fairly sizeable jumps.  There was one step-up that was particularly crazy, not a hard jump, but Pam decided to hit it quite fast for the camera!  She landed with her weight a bit far back and ended up heading straight for me on the side of the track.  A slow motion crash lead to me getting stuck between Pam, her bike and Tom's bike. Ouch!  All ok though. Here's a photo of her looking good seconds before disaster:

After a relaxed lunch in the sun. Bright sunshine at the end of September is good right? We did another lap of the red which was really fun now we knew pour way and trusted the loose terrain a little bit more.  Perhaps it would be better at the beginning of the season? And then another lap of the black where Tom once again used up of his remaining cat lives.  How many does he have left?  He survived a huge rock slab landing at race pace after a superb gorge line on the steepest section of the track.

Summary

To conclude, I would state that Crans Montana is fun for a bike park with only two trails.  The red is a fun jumpy bermed trail, but unfortunately it ends 3/4 the way down the hillside.

I would also argue that the black is definetly Euro DH race worthy.  A perfect challenge at higher speeds.

But with the likes of Saint Luc on the other side of the valley which features really fun trails, challenging trails and lots of easy to access single track it looses out a bit.  Also Verbier is closer and has so many tracks in it's park and so much single track!