Day 59: Les Gets Serious

28 Aug 2011

Day 59: The DH trails of Mont Chery and Morzine. Things got a little more serious today with the steeper more technical DH trails at Les Gets. We started off on the Mont-Chery side of town, where a gondola provides 365m of height gain for you to play with. The bike uplift stops here but there are 2 XC trails that climb up to the Mont-Caly peak, so you can give yourself a bigger descent if you want! There used to be a lot more here, higher lift access with the bike and a Kona jump park but, the intent by Les Gets is to move and concentrate all of this over the other side of town. The “Dans l’Gaz” DH is more like a DH course than the repetitive berms of the trails on the other side, with more opportunity to build up speed and roots and rocks to negotiate at that speed. It’s not a difficult black trail, but definitely worth checking out, and before you set off make sure you stop for a second to appreciate the incredible views of Mont-Blanc and the Aiguille Du Midi.

In the afternoon it was off to Morzine. You can get across from the top of the main Chavannes Express chairlift, but it involves a small pedal (or push) with a big DH rig – nothing too bad though. A gondola lift takes you up to Le Pleney, and this is where the tougher DH stuff is, as there is a steeper gradient to the hill and a bigger height drop of 500m. The black “Noir du Stade” has the steepest section which you can check out under the lift as you go up, along with an optional gap jump just below it. I very nearly wrecked myself on this as I was slow into it and came up very slightly short. And there is not much room after landing before hitting another drop almost immediately. All these trails have major root sections, very tricky in the wet. The interesting thing here though is the existence of numerous other trails disappearing into the woods everywhere you look. Presumably built by locals, these offer even more challenging sections than the marked trails.

At the end of the day it’s an easy roll back to Les Gets from the top of the Le Pleney lift. Only the 2 bike washes at the bottom of Chavannes but if the queue is big then consider riding 2 minutes over to the Mont-Chery lift where there are 4 hoses and hardly anyone using them! And a beer in the Irish or Canadian bars in town are a great way to end the day.

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