I’m not usually one to complain about the weather, but the last week in Switzerland has been particularly nasty. The national weather service was issuing warnings on last Thursday and Friday for high levels of precipitation. Rivers were swollen, the snow line dropped below 2000m in places and the weather was more like what we can expect in December than June.
Having said that I’ve developed a theory over the last few years that no matter how bad the weather gets there is always some valley somewhere that the weather is not quite so bad. There are so many micro-climates in different valleys here that it can literally be snowing in one valley and as soon as you go over a pass and drop into the next valley it can be 20deg and sunny. The hard part is figuring out which valley you need to go to.
After a day of checking and rechecking weather forecasts, tracking how the weather systems were developing and studying trail maps to find somewhere to ride, we were still not sure of the best place to go. The only thing for it was to make two plans and select the one to put into place at the last possible minute.
We met at 8am on a wet miserable Sunday morning at a motorway rest-stop in Central Switzerland and decided to head for Wallis. Our route took us over the 2300m Furka pass where we had to deal with temperatures down to -3deg, snow and almost zero visibility. As we dropped down into the valley I was feeling a little pessimistic as the weather did not seem to be improving until we drove through a tunnel near Ulrichen and came out the other side greeted by dry roads and the sun attempting to peek through the clouds.
We drove into the carpark for Riederalp to be given the good news that a day card cost only 17CHF to take our bikes on the whole Bettmeralp/Riederalp lift complex. We loaded the bikes on the cablecar and got a ride up to about 1900m. From there we climbed 200m to to ride a nice technical trail back down to the valley. The top section of the trail was in the clouds and had lots of quite slippery rock which made for a fair bit of pfaffing around tripodding and carrying the bikes., but as soon as we dropped out of the clouds we were treated to dry dusty alpine singletrail with nice rock passages, switchbacks, rooty forest sections and some amazing scenery. The rest of the day involved getting the lift back up and finding another trail to ride back down to the valley.
The area is a trail paradise. We only just managed to scratch the surface of the Riederalp area and there are two other lifts included in your day pass, not to mention the towns further up and down the valley that all seem to have the same potential for amazing trail riding.
We will definitely be back to explore more of this area. (and hopefully get to finally ride the Aletsch Glacier Trail)
