The weather was pretty good today, not as good as yesterday but still nice. I decided to take my bike out and attempt an itinerary that I’d never tried before: a tour of the Néron mountain. The Néron is a mountain just north-west of Grenoble at the south tip of the Chartreuse massif:


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Not long after moving to Grenoble, I bought a mountain bike itinerary book and I thought I’d follow their indications for this trip. Everything started rather well at my rather slow pace with a nice weather. Of course, it started getting colder as I climbed and ended up having to put my jacket on.

After about an hour of climbing, I was rather ready for the descent and that’s where the troubles started. Turned out the descent path was rather impracticable. To start with, it started a little too technique for my riding level but that’s not usually a problem: just unmount and pass the obstacles. However, as I was hiking down with my bike on my shoulder, it seemed like there were way too many tree trunks across the path. Now, you have to realize that this is/was a single track on a steep hillside with bushes on either side so there wasn’t much room to navigate or avoid any obstacles. Plus, many of the fallen trees were too high to be jumped over (I was able to slide my bike under several of these trunks).

After a while it appeared to me that maybe it wasn’t as random as it first appeared, especially considering the fact that I found white thread on the trail at several spots as well. Was it an attempt to prevent mountain bikers to ride this path? I don’t know but, after a while, it started to get tiring to have to carry the bike under/over fallen trees, trying to avoid brambles (tip: wearing shorts on an unknown trip involving single tracks: not a good idea!).

I finally arrived to a point where I saw hikers climbing up so I asked them how the path was further down, as they asked me how the path was looking further up. They confirmed that the trail quality didn’t improve significantly so I decided to cut my losses and started climbing back up. It was quite tiring to do so with the bike in tow but I was still not too far down, about only a 100 meters straight down, about 300-400 meters following the trail and it was better to have to climb now than get stuck further down the hill.

All in all, it was a little disappointing not to be able to complete the tour, especially since you always look forward to a single track descent after an hour climb! Of course, since I backtracked my path up, I enjoyed the descent on the road back but it cannot really compare to a single track. It was, however, good exercise and I got to see some really nice landscape. :)

I recorded my trip on pathtracks.com via PathTracker on my iPhone but my battery was getting low towards the end so the end of the trip is not really accurate. Still gives a good idea of what I did.

I will upload some pictures on my Flickr account as soon as I solve my current issue with my laptop kernel panicking as soon as I plug my camera in… :(

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