Another three months have passed since our last update. They have been the busiest three months in Swiss Alpine Adventures history. Since March we’ve run over 60 events including 8 mountain bike courses, weekly afterwork rides and weekend tours to locations such as the Jura, Central Switzerland, Wallis and Graubunden.
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| Switchback practice on one of our Alpine Skills courses. |
The interest in the group this year has been simply overwhelming. We’ve had in the region of 25 people coming on some of our afterwork rides, and almost all our weekend rides and courses are completely booked out with long waiting lists. Due to the interest we’ve added extra events to the calendar to try and cope with the demand (it’s not always possible to increase the number of people we take on each ride) and we’ve also had a number of members suggesting rides so that other members can come along with them. We are now looking for more people who are passionate about riding their bikes (MTB, Road or Touring) and would like to responsibly share this passion with others to help us by becoming organisers and maybe putting one or two events on the calendar. If you are not yet a member of our meetup group, why not join now and get involved in the fun.
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| Over 20 people at one of our afterwork rides in Zurich. |
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| Sunshine and scenery on one of our group rides in central Switzerland. |
We are currently lacking in events for touring bikes. Unfortunately, there is just not enough time for me to organise touring bike rides and keep up with the demand we have for other types of rides too. I know that there are a few people who would like to see some trekking/touring bike rides happening in the group so why not help us get the ball rolling and try to get something small and easy organised for those who enjoy riding their bike but are not too interested in single track or suffering up mountain passes on their road bikes. It really is a goal to make the group as accessible for as many people as possible.
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| Road rides are more regularly appearing on the calendar these days. |
Highlights
There have been a number of highlights to this year. For me one of the best things is seeing new people take up the sport of mountain biking and watching them develop and progress over the season. Their enthusiasm has been great and it’s amazing to see the smiles on peoples faces at the end of the rides. Here are a few random pictures from the rides we’ve organised so far this year.
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| Descending from the Antenna on our Chasseral ride. |
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| Flowy woodland single track on our Wallis group ride. |
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| Road biking in the shadow of Saentis. |
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| Not a bad view on a school night. Looking over Sihlsee from the top of Etzel on an afterwork ride. |
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Still a little bit of snow on the top of Klausenpass when it opened.
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| The descent from 3057m on our skills course in Engadin. |
Exploring
With the amount of events we’ve been organising (and having a full time day job) it’s been really difficult to find time to get out and ride some new routes. Luckily we took a few days earlier this month and put a plan I’d been working on for a while into practice. With the aid of the Post Auto we managed to do an Enduro version of the classic Furka-Nuffenen-Gothard road bike tour. With a bit of advanced planning and keeping strictly to our time plan we managed to get buses to the top of the passes with our bikes perched on the racks behind the bus and then enjoy single trail descents to the valleys below (mainly descending, each pass also required short climbs from the pass to get to the trail head). Having proved that the the round tour is possible we stayed in the area and rode the other side of Nuffenenpass and the Grimselpass using the same methods the day after. We’ll do a little bit more exploring in the area, but it’s given us some interesting ideas for group rides in 2013.
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| Trail scouting somewhere close to Nuffenenpass. |
We’ve also got for a days exploring into Wallis at the start of July and rode the Saflischpass. This was an amazing day in the mountains and one I myself would like to repeat again in the near future.
There are plenty of plans for exploring more routes. We’ll get out and do some more exploring whenever we get time to do so over the next couple of months. If all our plans come together 2013 will be a very exciting year for SAA…
Coming Up
Even though we are already thinking about potential routes and events for 2013, 2012 is far from over. We still have our afterwork rides planned for Tuesdays in and around Zurich, and a number of day trips planned for August, September and October. Full details can be found on the meetup group. If there is nothing on the calendar and you have an idea for an event then why not “suggest” an event and see if anyone would like to join you.
There will be a road ride this coming weekend on Sunday July 29th. Our next weekend group MTB ride will be on August 18th in the Hoch-ybrig area. Depending on how things work out there may be other events appearing on the calendar before that so check in our meetup group regularly.
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