My car was left at somebody else's house a few hours drive away. I could have gotten somebody to drive me around to collect my car that had been left near Aime in the neighbouring department of Savoie. I even had the idea to borrow a road bike and finally do the huge climb out of Beaufort and over the Cormet de Roseland. Instead the Tom's joined for a two day Oli-venture across the mountains.  There was hope for great singletrack, and I did warn them about some height gain.  It's just a shame many of the vertical metres gained where whilst pushing our bikes. Near the Col du Bonhomme looking into the Beaufortain We left Notre dame de la Gorge and pedalled for about 1 kilometre before the first section of pushing began.  And so it carried on for about 5 hours, ride, push, hike a bike, ride a little more and push even more.  Luckily we were fresh, the banter crude and the views in every direction were beautiful.  The views and sunset real...

I have been truly spoilt recently with trails and company.  As an all round package, Finale is great; sea, coffee, food, singletrack, beer and gelato.  We just found a package that was even better. Leaving Les Arc for Embrun we decided after 3/4 of the journey to check out a tasty looking footpath up above Briancon, just to break the journey up you know?  It turned out to be an absolute banger of flow. Me and Ali were chuckling all the way down. Basically things carried on like this for a the whole week, look for a nice footpath on the map and go ride an amazing singletrack trail. We started our road trip proper around Lac Serre Poncon.  You can read about my first visit earlier this May here  and here2 .  Since my last visit I'd been itching to get back and show people.  Unsurprisingly everyone loved what I had found.  THAT SOUTH FEELING! I've never had a col (mountain pass) named after me, but I now hav...