Notes from the Riviera, part four

Living up here in Molini it gets easy to take things for granted. It’s an amazing feeling to climb up above the village and look down on the valley, tracing the lines of the trails across the sides of the mountains. One follows this ridge here, another cuts straight down that face, you start at this peak and dive down all the way to the valley floor below. The numbers are huge: 10km for that run, 15km for another, 700, 900, 1,000m of descending.

From the vasqua above Triora I can maybe make out twenty trails. After seven months guiding here I’m starting to get a feel for them too, over all those kilometres of singletrack I’m starting to know where an awkward rock is waiting to take a pedal, which corners you can dive inside and pull a few metres out on the guy behind you, where a small crest can turn into a sweet stepdown if you carry some pace. There's nowhere I know of in the world with a trail network like this, where you can descsend such distances in one day. It’s like looking out over God’s own playground. And I’ve got the keys to it.


Yet that familiarity breeds laziness. If you spend all day everyday out in those mountains, you can forget that if you show mountains anything less than utter respect they will bite. Following a prepared trail you can head a long way out from the world, feel utterly separated from the rest of life, but it’s still a prepared trail. There’s a definite route, you know what’s coming up, where you’re going, even how long it’s likely to take. You’re wrapped in a layer of insulation from the truth of the mountains and when you start to peel away that insulation the truth can be unforgiving.

It was just a quiet day off, I had some time to kill in between groups and fancied heading out up the roads to clear my head. Grabbing my trail bike I started off towards an outcrop called Drego. Somewhere along the way I decided to be brutal with myself, one of those masochistic impulses that rushes through your blood and drowns out sense, with 1,000m of vertical climb ahead of me I’d test myself and see how far I could get before my legs gave out. That point arrived somewhere around 800m up, the point where you can’t keep pretending that your legs are giant pistons, but are more like half-set jelly.


Rolling back down that road I made my first mistake. Another one of those blood rushes, maybe, and before I had time to consider things like how much water or food I had with me I was diving off down a trail as it would be more fun than the road... My second mistake came at the first crossroad on that trail. Earlier in the day we’d been discussing a new line from those crossroads and it sounded so easy, I’d head straight on up the ridge and come out a bit further down the valley, the lure of virgin singletrack was too much for me to resist.

For the first kilometre or so it was exactly what I’d hoped for: steep, natural singletrack. Maybe the bushes needed a haircut or the odd rock needed moving, but you can forgive all that knowing you're the first person ever to ride that line. When the trail came to a house in the woods things became less clear though. One side was an orchard, on the other an old track cutting back into the valley, I also realised I didn’t have the energy to hike back up the way I’d came from. The track looked like it should traverse round the valley and if I followed it sooner or later I’d join up with one of our other lines, no worries. But after a couple of hundred metres the trail started getting fainter and more beaten...


Before I knew it I was carrying my bike on my shoulder as I scrambled across mudslides, supported by a root in one hand with a big drop waiting just a few metres below if I slipped. What little energy I had was fading fast, my water was long gone and it dawned on me that I had no idea how far round the valley I was. Eventually the trail stopped completely, gone in the centuries of mudslides and encroaching gorse bushes. If I carried on I would meet a trail, I was certain of that, but the question became whether I had enough energy to make it that far. Above me somewhere was another trail skirting the valley, but the side was too steep and the foliage too thick to carry a bike through.

It wasn’t a decision I consciously made. There wasn’t a long agonising debate over whether it was the right thing to do, whether I could afford to do it. If I was going to make it off that mountainside, I couldn’t take my bike with me. Free of my bike I could scramble on my hands and knees up through those bushes. Thorns tore at my arms and face, rocks buried themselves in my palms and branches lashed me, but by that point it mattered little. I had to get up to the path I knew was somewhere above me and some deep survival instinct spurred me on. When I reached the first landmark I recognised it was like someone pulled the rug from under me. Without adrenaline and fear to keep me going forwards the exhaustion pounded home like a sledgehammer, I was reduced to putting one foot in front of the other until I could get high enough to phone someone to come and pick me up.

The next day I ventured back in to recover my bike, which in itself turned into four hours of crawling through bushes and hacking through foliage. People asked me whether I left myself a trail so I could find it again, the answer was no. By the time I abandoned my bike, there was only one thing on my mind: getting out. I very nearly didn’t find it at all, but thought of how the hell I’d explain losing a bike to the guys at Saracen kept me going.


Looking back out over that valley today I don’t see the trees, the cliffs or the view out towards the Ligurian Sea, just the size of the forest. In that one side alone there must be over a hundred square kilometres of forest and over 800m of vertical drop. Lost in those trees with no landmarks there’s a good chance you wouldn’t be found in time. I was maybe only a few hundred metres from the trails I know so well, but they might as well have been a world away.

We’ve got a running joke on my days off now, I’m just going to nip up and do a quick run from Drego... Looking back it all seems slightly surreal as your brain doesn’t hold on to the memory of that survival instinct too well, you lose your grip on that certainty of the seriousness of the situation. With the adrenaline long gone you’re left with time to reflect and what it comes down to is really simple: I was silly to have gone in there in the first place and lucky to have got back out again. I took the mountains lightly and they very nearly bit me.


The big thanks here needs to go to Jo, one half of Riviera Bike, for coming and picking me up that afternoon. I should also say that Jo knew roughly where I was all along, we kept in touch by text, as heading out into the mountains if nobody knows you're there is a recipe for certain disaster. I also need to thank the guys at Saracen (Madison), Steve at Fisher and Si Paton at Descent Gear for helping me out. And last, but definitely not least, both halves of Riviera Bike (Ady and Jo) for putting up with me.

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