By Ambassador Sebastian De Meris
What a pleasure to go back to the Valais Alps, to go back to altitude, and to climb and have a big descent. To start the day, we took a small gondola where you must be very good at Tetris if you want to go up in a group. This cabin starting from the plain allows us to quickly gain 900 m of ascent, especially since we will have to climb 800 m afterward.
The path passes through typical small villages and goes up quietly into the forest. It becomes more difficult to reach the mountain pasture, with slopes sometimes exceeding 20% but the view is worth it.
Once at the top, we had a short break to get our strength back and eat our sandwiches before starting the descent.
None of us knew the trail we were going to take but what a surprise! The trail is perfect, sometimes playful, sometimes technical, with an incredible view and lots of flow.
One switch back turns after another, the trail follows the contours of the slope and winds through the trees and never seems to end.
The slope is perfect and the fir and larch needles fly in the wake of our wheels.
After more than 8 km and already 1300 meters of descent, we arrived in the valley where we still have about 500 m to go down partly on an old road, partly on paths. The environment changes and becomes drier compared to the beautiful forest where we come from.
Finally, after a descent that seemed endless, we arrive at the small gondola, happy to have found and ridden such beautiful trails with so much flow.
In several places on the trails, beautiful dry-stone walls were visible, so I went to look a little more closely at the Swiss topographic maps (where the old picture comes from). I didn’t find anything new, but the history is (I find) always interesting.
The Alps have been traveled for thousands of years, first on foot, with mules, then finally with mechanical means. These paths, connecting the valleys to the plain, were by far not always easy and served only for the transport of materials or goods. The same goes for the paths that existed thanks to the exploitation of the mountain pastures or the forests.
It was not until the 19th century that tourism developed in the Swiss Alps, but again, most of the trails were not dedicated to leisure use and it was not until the 1930s that trails in Switzerland were marked for hiking. Why talk about hiking? Simply because the marked hiking network in Valais or more generally in Switzerland is very dense and we are lucky that mountain biking is allowed or at least tolerated on the vast majority of these trails that already existed before the first mountain bikes.
I won’t go into details, but with an ever-increasing number of mountain bikers and hikers, the pressure on the trails is always increasing. Especially since some trails, worn out by decades of all kinds of crossings and by a sometimes-harsh climate, are not always a pleasure to ride down. In a small country like Switzerland, the territory is by far not an infinite resource, and it is not easy to develop or create new trails in an already dense network. One of the solutions found is to rehabilitate or redevelop old paths or so-called historical routes that have been neglected and as you can see below where there are exactly 100 years in between; nature is taking back its rights.
The advantage of these paths is that the slope is relatively gentle and constant and they are built solidly, often with stone reinforcements. They can be difficult to find and take time to be rebuilt, but in the end, they really do make great trails for mountain biking.
