Say Chamonix and you think of blue skies, epic glaciers and the Mont Blanc towering over the village. Needless to say this place also has some hidden gems, away from the beaten path. Graham and Luke show you around.

There’s a couple ways MTB journalism works. The most common is the editor decides they want a certain type of article (in this case, big epic scenery riding in the alpine above the treeline) and rifles through their list of contacts to find someone to write it. That someone then says yes (well, usually, I mean who doesn’t say yes to going for a big epic scenery ride in the alpine above the treeline?), finds a photographer to make them look like a better rider than they are, and heads out to create said content. 

And that was the plan for this. “Ride out on a quest for the finest alpine trails and write words of infinite beauty about them” was roughly how the request went. Only there were just a couple of problems. Firstly, the weather still thinks it’s winter in the alps, so everything above the treeline is blanketed in snow and, secondly, France went into its 3rd confinement in April and we could only go 10km from our front door. 

No worries, from the start of May we could travel around France, surely there would be some fine sub alpine singletrack to plunder in the Jura or Voges? Maybe we could head south towards the Mediterranean? It’s always sunny by the Med.... Nope. The weather never read the message about spring and it kept raining. Or snowing. Or both. 

Luke, a photographer who specialises in making us riders look better than we are, and I searched through our archives to see if there was any old content we could pretend was current and recycle to fill the brief, but that wasn’t really doing it either.  

There was only one thing for it. 

Ignore the brief completely and head to Flatiere. 

Flatiere?  

Flatiere is the local spot that everyone has. And not just as a riding venue, it’s anywhere that tourists don’t know to go. Where locals head to as default, knowing if they see anyone they probably recognise them. Pubs, cafes, parks, rides. They all have the same system. Look at the well-known spot, then turn 180 degrees and you’ll find the real gold. 

That’s Flatiere.  

Our Flatiere (because it’s an actual place called Flatiere, your Flatiere will probably called something different or else that’s a very weird coincidence) is in the Chamonix valley, opposite Mont Blanc, the Les Houches lifts and all the spots you’d gravitate to if you went to Chamonix on holiday. It’s about 360m of pedalling up the road from the Les Houches train station to get to the main trailhead, and then by deduction, about 360m of descending back down to the base of the hill. Only there’s so much more than these numbers in-between. 

Split roughly into three sectors, each with their own convenient climbing loop to pedal back round on, Flatiere is perfect for taking whatever length of time you have for a ride, and letting you make the most of it. With a further three options to head to either Servoz or Chamonix in one fell swoop of MTB descending goodness, or to keep pedalling and pushing a bit higher from the road end into the higher forest or even the alpine if your legs are feeling enthusiastic it’s easy to end up staying out for just one more lap. 

By mixing loops on each section with longer full laps you quickly forget you’re close to town and get lost in the calm of the forest with occasional glimpses of some of Europe's highest hills peaking through the tree canopy. Or at least, if it’s not pouring with rain and the cloud cover sat a few hundred meters above your head you can glimpse the mountains. Obviously, being so close to the valley whilst simultaneously feeling like you’re nowhere near another human makes this a popular spot for locals to walk dogs, forage for mushrooms, run, snowshoe, track and just sit in the sun enjoying the silence. There’s also plenty of wildlife trying to deal with us humans ever encroaching onto their turf. As a shared area we need to ride responsibly, being nice and saying hi to everyone we meet and not damaging the trails that are there. There’s also currently a voluntary moratorium on new trails to avoid encroaching further on the nature in the area, but don’t worry, you’re not going to run out of existing trails here any time soon. 

And ok, these trails aren’t the sweeping golden ribbons of singletrack that we were meant to be documenting. They might not be out in the open, but they are very good. Being a hillside criss-crossed by a maze of trails, both walking trails made by ancestors from generations past and more recent landscaping by the local riders, you can’t describe just one trail, but you can describe the feel. And what sort of feel do you want? The upper tier of trails is where the most technical options are. Thanks to the hard work of glaciers a few millennia ago, the trails take in clean flowy slabs, as well as slabs so steep you’re buzzing your butt cheeks on the rear tyre. Best done in the dry those.... The trails don’t all feature rock and gnar. Ironically the trail that starts closest to the small Coupeau rock climbing crag (Chamonix’s best lesser known crag if you like crimpy 6a to 7a climbing. It’s not just bikers that treasure their quiet spots away from the masses) is actually the flowiest and loamiest of all the trails on the hill! 

Moving on to the mid-mountain trails and it’s about now that you really start to notice how damn good folk were at finding the easiest way to navigate the terrain. If you stick to descending the original footpath, worn in by hundreds of years of locals walking up to their houses and the summer alpages, or the relaxed signposted bike/snowshoe trail for the pedal back up then you’d be forgiven for thinking there isn’t much gradient in the middle of the hill. Follow any of the newer bike trails that branch off from the main trail and you’ll quickly be disabused of that idea. And quickly testing your brakes too. But unlike those high alpine trails, the consequence of not matching ambition to ability isn’t plunging off a cliff, rather a roll down soft loamy forest floor, whilst everyone else either falls off their bike laughing....or because they’ve got in over their grip levels too. 

One, two, three. Down to the final tier of our triptych of trails. Normally you’d expect the trees to be thinner and the views better near the top of the hill. Flatiere does things differently and thanks to forestry work and old growth forest, the lowest level actually has the best views and the most open riding. It’s still not swooping through high mountain alpages, but it is a bit faster and there's less opportunities to ride straight into a tree. Soon you’re back at the Les Houches train station wondering if you’ve got the legs to pedal up for another lap. 

Like your Flatiere, the trails are all named. Kenny Loggins; He wrote the Danger Zone theme to Top Gun so you can probably guess it’s not a flow trail. Chamonish; Lots of slabs, like Squamish. Ish. Epic Woods; It’s in the woods, it’s epic. Piff Paff; Low down there’s a steep chicane through some big rocks, piff paff and you’re through. You get the idea. Unlike the Les Houches Bikepark trails across the valley the trails don’t have any name boards or maps, but they’re there nonetheless. They’re definitely not all on Strava or Trailforks either, and hopefully it’ll stay that way. Some things are better after a bit of searching to find them. But if you ride up to the Flatiere car park and trail head, drop in to the main trail (and as there’s only one trail dropping down out of the car park you can’t really go wrong there) keep your eyes open and you’ll be rewarded with trail gold for as long as you have the energy to pedal back up for another lap of following tyre tracks in the dirt. 

These are the areas that make up most of our riding, no matter where you live. The big epic days are amazing, but it’s the bread and butter rides that keep us going. They are the long term relationship we have with biking. Sure, those local trails might not be perfect, might not have the huge vistas or thousands of meters of continuous descent, but you love them all the more for the foibles.  And if you did those big epic rides every day, they’d cease to be so amazing. Think about it, without your day to day, after work ride, “normal” trails you’d have no context to enjoy those huge epic days. The special days are only that because they’re in contrast to the normal. So whilst we completely failed to fulfil our big epic scenery brief, I’m not going to apologise for our Flatiere or yours. Trails like these are what makes mountain biking so epic, because they let us riders make more of our mountain biking. 

Maybe sometime soon, when we can all safely go somewhere different, if you’re in Chamonix and the weather’s doing what the weather sometimes does or if you just fancy a change, turn your back on the big hills, take the train to Les Houches and go for an explore in the woods below Flatiere. You won’t be disappointed, and you’ll probably feel just a little bit at home.

By Graham Pinkerton
Although hailing from Scotland, Graham has been settled in the alps for many years now. When he is not out doing silly mountain adventures on ski's you can find him digging new trails in the Chamonix area, or riding his bike down some exposed, tech, gnarly alpine terrain. Besides the talent to find epic trails, he also possesses the magic ability to write about a wide range of subjects, and somehow make them related to mountain biking.

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