Day 3: Into Wallis.
After the disappointment of day 2 we had high hopes for day 3. Having done the exact route a few weeks earlier I knew that if the weather stayed good it would be a lot of fun, however the forecast was for rain. We woke at 7am looked out the window in Spiez and were delighted to see that it was still dry. We wolfed down breakfast and headed off to get our bag to the train station before 9am, then had some time to catch our train to Hohten.
At Hohten we got out of the train sorted our gear out and immediately made the short road descent to get to the start of the BLS Sudrampe. 1km into the trail there were smiles all around and the disappointment of the previous day was forgotten. The Sudrampe trail has everything that the Alps offers crammed into one 20km long trail.
The last section of this route brings us out at Brigerbad via really technical trail with tight switchbacks in a rocky descent. After completing the last set of steps at the bottom of the trail we were grinning from ear to ear as we rode a paceline into Brig to catch a bus up to the cablecar station for Belalp.
At Belalp we descended a short distance on fire road to get to the start of the trail. Once on the singletrack there is close to 100m of climbing to be done before we start the descent back down to Brig. The climb is flowy and nice enough to forget about the suffering of climbing as you try to ride as fast as you can.
The trail eventually flattens off before starting to descend after a small church sitting in a little Hamlet with stunning views of the surrounding mountains. As we dropped into the woods and started to descend our bikes seemed to come alive. The last time I had ridden this trail we had 9 punctures in the group, this time we had no such problems and we rode this super fast and flowy trail as fast as we could the whole way down to Brig where we arrived just in time to catch our train to Zermatt.
Day 4: Zermatt.
We woke up to the sound of rain on the window in Zermatt. After 3 days on the bike it was a good excuse to alter our original plan and have a bit of a sleep in. The original route for Day 4 was to ride from Gornergrat down the valley to Zermatt and on down the valley to Tasch and beyond. With the rain we decided to stay an extra night in Zermatt and do Gornergrat the following day, this meant that when the rain stopped we had time to go out and explore some more trails around Zermatt.
We decided to go to the Sunnega area and ride the Downhill course that will be used for the European championships next year and to do some exploring in the woods underneath Sunnegga. The Downhill course was proper downhill, huge jumps, steep descents and long technical passages. The woodland trails offered a really good mix between flowy and technical. We could have spent the whole week exploring this area alone and every time we got down to the valley it was straight back on the funicular to go up and try another trail back down.
After an amazing afternoon of trail riding it was back to the Youth Hostel for dinner. We ended up sitting next to Olympic Snowboard Halfpipe gold medal winner Gian Simmen who turned out to be a really sound bloke. We spent the next three hours playing table tennis with him and the young snowboard prodigy he was coaching and generally having a good laugh.
