Proving Grounds

Dan Milner and crew embark on an intrepid mission to ride down the line of abandoned, high-altitude cable car stations above Chamonix

-  By Dan Milner. Photographs by Dan Miller

France's Cosmiques Couloir is a steep 45-degree, 800m-high, 10m-wide gulley pinched between towering cliffs. I've ridden it once before, on a snowboard, and I can safely say I'll never do that again. It was a sphincter-tightening episode that required ice axes and hope in equal measure in fact, just the kind of 'jolly' day out that's long been putting Chamonix on the map for folk looking to prove something. But I have nothing to prove anymore. If I can finish a descent on a bike or a snowboard without injury and with a smile on my face, then I'm happy.

Now, a decade later, I'm standing with fellow mountain bikers Ludo May, an ex-Enduro World Series racer who represents new Swiss bike brand SCOR, and Jez Wilson, an ex-pat Brit, alongside a derelict cable car station bathed in autumn colours, looking up at the ignominious ice-choked chute that was once the source of so much angst. Thankfully, today's focus is on dirt rather than ice. At our feet lies 1,400 vertical metres of writhing alpine singletrack. Our route bounds down the mountainside in as straight a line as it can get away with, throwing in just a handful of tiny wiggles in more than an entire vertical kilometre, as if sketched on the map by someone with a pen they know is about to run out of ink.