It’s funny, I wasn’t planning to sign up for a day 2. I mean, I had every intention to stay in Chamonix, and I did, but it wasn’t until yesterday around noon after I’d given my awesome rental bike back and a family was asking Pascal if he’d take them out on the trails that I casually said “Of course,” when he asked me if I was coming back the next day. After the ride yesterday I didn’t think I’d have the legs to get up anymore hills. This might have been true. But oh, the downhills, the downhills… I couldn’t get it out of my head. I was willing to suffer the uphill for those sweet, sweet, downhills.
Pascal did teach me a few new things today. The first is that even after a long lecture about how to go up a steep hill with loose rocks and gravel, I still will only get a third of the way up before putting my foot down, and he’ll get about three-quarters of the way up before he has to put his foot down, thankyouverymuch. I also learned that my favorite downhill technique still doesn’t work that well if there’s too much grade. I kept having to stop down a rocky embankment because I felt like I was going to flip over onto my head. “You haf to do like dis,” Pascal said, and hung his ass off the back of his saddle, right over his back tire. So I tried this, and what do you know, my new favorite mountain biking move. Off I went, hanging my ass off the back of my bike wherever and whenever I could. That is, of course, until he taught me how to jump my front tire over stuff. Jump? Did I hear someone say jump? I like to jump over things. When I was in high school track, I ran the hurdles. When I learned how to ride horses, I jumped them over things. And now, now I want to jump mountain bikes. It’s true, my first few jumps were unsuccessful. I only managed to bounce up and down on the front suspension a few times, like a baby bird feebly trying to fly. I kept watching him, kept trying it, and finally, I got my front tire off the ground. Then it was like I was in the circus. “You don’ haf to jump everyting,” he said. Well, what fun is that? I was jumping twigs, little pebbles, a blade of grass, my own shadow.
We were in Vallorcine today, a short train ride away from Chamonix, but we were going to bike the whole way back. After a few grueling uphills, we came to a single track area of rolling hills and rocky terrain. I had trouble navigating this at the start. Everything was either too narrow or too bumpy or too inconvenient for her highness the asphalt queen. “There are so many rocks!” I yelled to Pascal as he disappeared over a ridge. When I got to the other side he yelled back, “This is a mountain!” Touché. At one point I simply stopped in frustration. Pascal looked back at me and stopped as well. “You haf to look ahead,” he said, and rode off. What did this mean? I tell my horseback riding students this exact same thing all the time. There isn’t a lesson that would go by that I didn’t tell someone that at least once, more commonly five or six times throughout the course of the lesson. What exactly did I want them to do with that information? Whenever you give someone ambiguous advice like this, they interpret it as best they can. As such, some of my students would invariably look where they were planning to be, which is what I wanted, but some would just tilt their chins up and stare off into the ether, obviously unsure of where exactly they were looking except into that nebulous space called “ahead,” and of course some, some would just never listen at all.
I started off like this, looking into that space I had decided was “ahead.” When you do this, however, you aren’t able to concentrate on any one thing, precisely because you have no idea what you’re supposed to be concentrating on. My gaze would shift from Pascal’s back tire to a tree off in the distance to a pointy rock directly in front of me, which I would of course collide with head on. I finally stopped and put my foot down. Pascal was getting smaller in the distance as he climbed up another short hill and then disappeared over the top. This is not going to defeat me.
I sincerely doubt this is the voice of God whenever I hear these kinds of statements, because I always figure God has better things to do than to instruct me in the finer points of mountain biking. Maybe what it really is is that small coach inside my head that’s so often trumped by his counterpart the little naysayer, that I forget he exists and I think it’s God speaking to me. When my little coach comes through for me though, he really comes through, and he’s the spinach to my Popeye that I need to get over the mountain.
I picked my foot up and started cranking down the trail, concentrating on a consistent distance in front of my bike, never wavering by looking too far ahead or too close to my front tire. I kept my speed mostly the same, trying not to panic when the traction became questionable, saving my energy for the bursts of acceleration needed up a short, steep area. I didn’t look to see how far Pascal was ahead of me, and I stopped worrying that I was potentially blocking anyone behind me. Every root, rock, and deep spot became just another small obstacle on my journey instead of a giant roadblock that would cause me to stop and put my foot down. I’m not sure how long I rode like this, as time became immaterial, but when I finally noticed that Pascal had stopped, we’d come to a crossroads in the trail and he was beaming. “Goooood!” he said in his trademark French way. He wasn’t kidding. I’d just navigated a trail that was labeled on the map in my backpack as “difficult.” All that matters though, is what it’s labeled in my own head, and my ability to look forward with focus at where it is I want to go instead of obsessing over what is, in the grand scheme of a whole mountain, a pebble in my path.
“Now it all downhill!” Pascal said. This is exactly what I wanted to hear. We flew down the mountain, that is, until we got to a sharp switchback that I had to walk (I haven’t yet learned how to navigate those, despite Pascal explaining how I needed to push my bike out in front of me) and then zipped into the valley where the trails are all covered in grass from the changeable French summers. We rode across a wooden bridge and over a meltwater river, passing under the huge blue glacier La Mer de Glace, and then through the tiny French town of Vallorcine. The houses here are all brown wood with red painted shutters and doors, exploding with rainbows of flowers from their porches, windows, and ornately carved balconies. Pascal knew all the small routes through town, and paused periodically to chat up a guy cutting wood in his front lawn or a woman watering her plants. He took me past the helicopter landing pad where the mountain rescue teams waited for a call (the red helicopter is for fire and the blue is an ambulance, in case you were wondering), and then past the large parking lot where two enormous climbing walls were set up, awaiting the weekend’s climbing competition. We rode back into the woods, down a few more short but sweet single tracks, and then back to the trail with the small bridges that I’d ridden the day before. This is where Pascal taught me how to jump my front tire over the lip of the bridge. My first attempt was ill-timed, but Pascal knew I couldn’t get into much trouble over these small bridges. After that, I was a jumping fiend. I noticed he wasn’t jumping things anymore by the third bridge in our path, but I was. By the time we got back into Chamonix I was seriously considering going out a third day, but my legs were furious with the idea of climbing anymore mountains, so I told Pascal at our after ride drink session that I’d be taking the next day off. “No problem,” he said. “You like mountain biking?” What to say? “I love mountain biking,” I said. He laughed, and raised his beer glass to my orange juice (no, I haven’t turned into a drinker recently either).
I had the ridiculous idea that after three hours of mountain biking I’d hike half the Chamonix valley. This is pretty typical, if you know me (and you do), and I haven’t figured out how to break the habit. I loaded up my backpack with nectarines, apples, those awesome French butter biscuits, water, and my big ass camera and rode the gondola up towards Aiguille du Midi again. At the halfway point, before you actually get up to Aiguille du Midi, you can disembark and either visit a souvenir shop or hike a number of trails back down into Chamonix or due east towards La Mer de Glace. Brox and his mountaineering friends had recommended this relatively level trail high across the valley floor that ended at the glacier where you could take the cogwheel train back down into town. “It’s only about an hour hike,” they’d said. This is the last time I take hiking estimates from mountaineers at face value. While the trail was fairly flat, as they said it would be, the hike was more like a three hour sojourn across the entire side of the mountain, sometimes with scrambling and other times with wading through streams cascading across the trail. I can’t deny, it was still spectacular, with calendar-quality views of Mont-Blanc and the Chamonix valley far below. I even ran into a crazy French person who asked me if I could speak Japanese, and a French family whose dad called me back from my high point on the trail to hike all the way to where they were so I could take a photo of them (which he painstakingly set up and insisted that I kneel on the grass to get the best shot).
By 6 p.m. I started to get concerned that the end of this trail was still nowhere in sight. Brox had told me that the train stopped running at 4:30. If this was true, I had this hike to finish as well as another two hour hike down into the valley, at which point I’d actually be nowhere near the town of Chamonix, would miss the last 7:30 bus, and would probably have to take a taxi back to Les Bossons. A half hour later, I rounded a bend of rocks and saw the train station, the tracks, and the dazzling Mer de Glace glacier framing the entire scene. It didn’t look like the train was running, so I of course stopped to enable my boyfriend the tripod to take some pictures of me. By the time I hoofed it down to the bottom of the trail, I heard the distinct chugging of a cogwheel train lumbering up the mountainside. Ah yes, saved again. I ran up the path to the train station and there were at least twenty people waiting in line for the last train of the evening back to Chamonix.
The train is a big deal in this bustling alpine town. Brox said that when the train turned 100 years old, the town threw a huge party for it with a parade, bands, food, dancing, the works. You can still see remnants of the party around as you ride the train down from the glacier. Posters hung on the sides of buildings and houses say thank you to the train for a hundred years of lugging tourists around, I guess. It is a pretty cool ride, especially when you’ve realized you just saved yourself another two hours of hiking and then an hour of trying to flag down a cab in the middle of nowhere.
I barely caught the last bus back to Les Bossons by the skin of my teeth. When I got to the chalet, everyone was sitting in the backyard and there were three new guests. I made my grand entrance and Curly asked me how the mountain biking had gone. “Well, the guy taught me how to hang off the back of my saddle as I go downhill,” I said. “I really like that part.”
“What else did he say?” Curly asked.
“He said not to do that going uphill,” I remarked, which this new crowd found amusing.
Adam, Tom, and Lucy, the newcomers, are all mountaineers, or as the French like to call them, alpinistes. Adam is also a mountain biker, “in case it’s raining and I can’t go climbing,” he told me. The three of them invited me to dinner at a place that Tom had been to before, where Curly said they served “nice French peasant food.” Peasant food, I learned, are things like “croute,” a dish of white wine soaked bread slathered in cheese with a layer of ham and tomato underneath, and topped with a fried egg. It’s wicked tasty, but I couldn’t finish it. I think you either have to be a French peasant working your fields all day, or a Slovakian girl like Lucy who’s been climbing Mont-Blanc all day in order to down this dish. From what I could put together, Adam and Tom are both English (and Tom has a highfalutin stuffy-nosed British accent like Hugh Grant, I kid you not), and Adam works in automotive engineering and research, while Tom is from the planet Krypton where he ponders the wonderful properties of platinum all day long. Ok, I’m not really sure what Tom does. He’s a nerd, works or goes to school at a university (I’m not sure which), and uses these 5000 lb. platinum discs all day for I’m not sure what. Today I learned, among other things, that platinum has a melting point of 1773 degrees Centigrade.
Tom wanted to know all about Google, while I wanted to know all about mountaineering. Yes, after mountain biking, which I’ve barely even started yet, I’m already looking for my next most insanely expensive and dangerous sport. I haven’t formulated a concise opinion about climbing yet, other than you can get really hurt and Japanese tourists will find you fascinating, and I’m still not sure I actually want to do it, but maybe I want to “try” it. Any sport where you get to wear crampons and carry a pickaxe and ropes has got to be cool on some level. Plus, don’t these people get all the best angles when they’re taking photos?
The other thing I learned this evening is that I’m not the creme brulee snob I thought I was. Lucy informed me that yes, creme brulee is supposed to be cold in the center, and only the flame crusted surface should be warm. Shows what I know. This week I’ve already had to revise my opinion of mountain biking, the domesticity of twenty year old English guys, the fragility of life and friendship, and my own innate abilities to succeed, so why not creme brulee too?
