It’s true, we’ve been ignoring the blog more and more of late. Truth be told we’ve been working on so much other stuff to improve Swiss Alpine Adventure that we pretty much forgot about the blog. We’ve been keeping people up to date through our Facebook page and working on getting as much exciting stuff as possible on our 2012 calendar.
So far the work we’ve been doing seems to be paying off. Many of the 2012 rides and events we’ve posted have either filled up or gotten pretty close before we ever even got a chance to tell people about them! We had three different ski days during the winter with an average of 12 people on each one. We’ve also had our first bike tour of the season (again with 12 people, looks like 12 might become the SAA magic number!) and run our first MTB beginners course which introduced 5 new people to the awesome sport of mountain biking.
What is proving really great about 2012 so far is that we have so many of our old faces and regulars still coming out and joining us on rides and at the same time we are getting new faces all the time too. Our start of season MTB ride was close to a 50/50 mix of new and old faces with one of the attendees being one of the original people who attended the very first ride I organised back in 2007.
Road Rides
We’re also branching out a little in 2012. We’ve decided to organise some road rides to bring the SAA philosophy (which has proven popular on the trails of Switzerland) onto the road. Our first road ride is going to be on Sunday April 1st (It’s not an April fools joke!) and it is already totally full up with 20 people attending! If you still want to join you can sign up for our Meetup group and get on the waiting list in case anyone decides they can’t make it at the last minute.
Following on from this our roadie coordinator Ian has posted a few more really great rides taking in Appenzell, Glaubenbergpass and Klausenpass in the coming weeks to get the SAA roadie season into full swing. Once the evenings get a little longer we’ll try to organise a regular Thursday evening road ride leaving the outskirts of Zurich and trying to take in different roads, sights and villages each week. We’ll also try to shift the finish town around too so that our sociable roadies can enjoy a cool refreshing beverage in different surroundings at the end of their ride each week before taking a train back to Zurich.
Heading out on the road has not curbed our enthusiasm for getting off the beaten track and onto the single trails of Switzerland in the slightest. There are a lot of diverse mountain bike events on the calendar too, ranging from courses, to scenic tours with not too much technical difficulty to technical enduro type days which will challenge the most skilled riders amongst us and of course keeping the ever popular and now almost traditional afterwork rides going for another year. All the details for these rides and much more are available on our Meetup group.
A little note about Meetup.
This is a social networking platform designed specifically for groups like Swiss Alpine Adventure who are organising events for others to join. Signing up for access to the site is free and it provides an excellent resource for us to give information on the events we are organising, allow RSVP’s for the events and for us to share photos from the events with group members afterwards. If you are not already a member sign up and have a look at what events we’ve got in store in the coming months.
Jerseys
After a few members requested an SAA jersey we’ve finally gotten it together and had the first prototypes delivered last week. The standard jersey is going to be a long sleeve freeride jersey in green and black and we’ll also do a matching road jersey if there is enough interest. The cost of the Jerseys will be 95CHF and they can be purchased by sending a mail to info (at) swissalpineadventure.com
Courses:
We still have places on our second intermediate and advanced courses (the first ones are totally booked out!) in April/May. The courses are aimed at getting people out on the trail and providing them with the skills and the confidence required to improve as easily as possible. Full details are available here.
Drinks Night:
We’ve got a drinks night on Wednesday 4th of April. If you are in the Zurich area and want to see what SAA is all about then come along. Full details are available in our meetup group.
Looking forward to seeing a lot of new (and old) faces out on the roads and trails of Switzerland in the coming weeks and months.
