Pushing my foot harder towards the floor the car springs to life. Dumping petrol faster and faster into the waiting cylinders the world begins to blur. With each new gear there's time to breathe, the little, straining engine doesn't have enough torque spin the big gears so I can take a moment to remember, let it sink in that I might not get to ride the best trail in the world this year. As I hurtle past slow-moving lorries and skim Fiat Pandas as they wander between lanes, I know it's not really going to make a difference. You can outrun some things in this life, but can you beat the seasons?

I'd left it late. Summer passed in a blur of bikes, motorway journeys and cheap hotel rooms. Tobi's vague invitation to a small, Swiss mountain resort whose name kept slipping my mind could wait until the world stopped spinning. That was before he mentioned what he wanted to show me... Too many people carelessly throw around the phrase "the best trail in the world." Few of them back it up with details like "10km of flowing singletrack starting at 2,700m and we'll need to sleep in a mountain farm the night before and hike to the trail for sunrise." Somehow it got much easier to remember the name Lenzerheide and find free days in my calendar after that.

September was already upon us and it quickly became a race against time to get there before winter won, before that endless line of singletrack disappeared beneath the snow for another six months. Pulling into town, heavy, grey skies hung overhead, it looked like I had already lost and the weather reports made grim reading. All that petrol was burnt for nothing. After tracking Tobi down we had to make tough decisions. Could we risk it? 2,700m is a long way up if a system closes in... In the end there wasn't a decision to make. It was simply too dangerous and we would have to wait and see if it cleared later in the week.












Time passes slowly when you're watching the sky. Days dragged and the F5 key got mashed over and over again, waiting for better news from the forecasts. Finally Thursday brought us a break - a bluebird sky and internet certainty that it'd hold for the next 48 hours. It was enough. Come 4 o'clock we bundled the bikes into the gondola and nervously climbed out of town. It was hard to know what we'd find at the summit and those fifteen minutes up were unbearable, the hopes of a season weighing on what we found at the top.

Again, luck was with us and the snow wasn't too deep. The tracks were open and the first prize of the journey was ours - the 1,000m descent to the farm. Picking our way through the scree, the steep, technical slopes soon gave way to fast-running singletrack. Hurtling through fields of rocks strewn across the valley, somehow their shape meant you could pump the formations. Rather than mech-ripping terrors, each one became a chance to try and find more speed and all too soon we were pulling up at the farm, grinning from ear-to-ear.

I don't even want to think about what it would be like to live that high up. It takes a special type of person to embrace that kind of insular mountain life and, as the door swung open, the banjo from Deliverance was looping through my head. What greeted us were two smiling brothers who laughed constantly and spoke heavy, impenetrable Swiss-German as they cooked. I was fooled by the small portions of bready meatballs, forgetting that those mountain folk know how to pack a lot of food into a tiny space. Weighed down by solid protein and lulled by the Birnen (incredibly strong pear schnapps, probably distilled in a bath somewhere), we retreated beneath our sleeping bags and braced for a 5am start.

Sunrise was still a couple of hours away as the shrill scream of the alarm pierced my sleep. Somehow the brothers were already up and ladling out more heavy protein and strong coffee, preparing us for hiking in the bitter cold. Forced out the door by the knowledge that we needed to catch that sunrise the reality of high alpine biking dawned on me. All those miles of pedaling this summer at sea-level weren't going to help carry a bike on my shoulder, over 2,000m up. Muscles burned, rocks struck my shins and I struggled to breathe as I tried to hold pace with Tobias and Julia. They made this look easy. Never have I willed so much hate into two people as they skipped, seemingly-effortlessly, ahead for the next couple of hours. Daylight only made things worse as I could start to see the scale of the valley we were tackling, and how little we'd managed so far.









Slowly but surely the head of the valley got closer, inch by hard-fought inch. Yet all the pain, the misery, the hatred of Tobi and Julia melted away as I stepped onto that last ridge and saw the world stretching before me, bathed in the sun's first light. And there it was. One beautiful thread of trail winding out into the distance. Maybe it's the most perfect thing I have ever seen, that combination of high mountains, singletrack and sunlight.

What Tobi has found isn't the most technical trail in the world, it isn't the fastest and it isn't packed with jumps and big hits. What it is, is ten kilometres of the pure mountain biking. Flowing down from the crest you pass from snow, into rocks, into dirt, back into rocks and back into dirt again, but the terrain isn't what overwhelms you. It's that one perfect moment you find on some trails. That combination of speed and feeling a long way from the rest of the world, but stretched out to an hour-plus descent in one of the most beautiful spots you could imagine... Is it the best trail in the world? I can't say yes, because if you've found the best trail in the world, why push on and find out what else is out there? What I can say for sure is that it's one of the best trails I've ridden so far...