It is counterintuitive to point a bicycle down a mountain and under no circumstances apply the brakes. But our instructor is three times women’s world champion (over-29 category) so she should know. And she does because after I’m launched off a rock and plunged down a muddy gully my instinct – wondering what other unsettling obstacles might lie ahead – overrides my intellect and I grab the brakes, suffer the resulting skid and slow-mo fall into scrubby grass. This time it’s funny and painless: I’m back in the giddy sphere of rolling down grass as a child.
With all due respect to their beauty and danger, the Alps can be like a great big playground. Winter snow-sliding is well established but summer sports are growing as I find in an August break in the Portes du Soleil mountainous terrain of 400sq m (1,036sq km) spanning the Swiss/French border. We base ourselves in the Swiss resort of Champéry – home to locals and internationals, including British, Irish and Dutch (royal family).
The community came out on Swiss National Day (celebrating the foundation of the country in 1291), marked on August 1st each year, and the main street clacked and pucked with traditional games reacquainting children with wooden toys; food stalls lined the road, banners on shops heralded fun and nationalistic pride, and people caught up in chance meetings on tarmac and tables outsides cafes. After dark, the pavements were packed with people holding flaming flares to watch the procession of anything goes – from a farmer showing off his cows adorned with flowery head-dresses, to a cool, acrobatic cyclist wheeling over a car bonnet and roof, and a young band on the back of a lorry living the full electric-guitar fantasy.
The day had begun with a different type of musicians – an oompa-oompa brass band rounded out with tuba and accordion – at the top of the main lift out of Champéry. They played outside a mountain-high cafe which had laid out a buffet breakfast to get the day started sated and vitalised.
From the cafe we look across at the seven Dents du Midi peaks, a biting backdrop to Champéry, which are forever appearing and disappearing in the mist that rolls up the valley and sometimes sits on its floor for hours, erasing the town. From the top of the cable-car, the toothy peaks are the only reminder of the town, as this part of the mountains forms a huge bowl holding an Alpine world of meadows, flowers, farms, forests and fauna – with all evidence of urbanisation hidden outside its rim.
It feels free up here (despite the infrastructure of ski lifts, 22 of which run throughout the year) where you can wander about, talking to cows and llamas, swishing through Alpine flowers, watching marmots ripple over rocks and walking through fairy-tale woods and atop ridges.
Our walk to the Auberge-Restaurant Chez Gabi takes us along the edge of the bowl and then across and up onto a plateau. “Do you want the quickest, harder route or the easier longer one?” asks our guide in broken English. “Le plus belle,” I request. “Plus jolie,” he corrects me, indicating a language nuance. And he takes us through, indeed pretty, woods enchanted (“pleasing” in the French language and the way I feel) with outsized red mushrooms dotted with white spots, emerald mossy rocks, dappled sun through the trees and a cool peaty pine-needled and coned floor.
We emerge from the woods for lunch on the restaurant terrace overlooking an enclosed area with grassy mounds pocked with burrows, declaring itself Parcs Marmottes. We watch the sweet creatures up close while downing local wine and food: think potato and cheesy soup, muscly mountain meat (goat or beef), goat’s cheese salad and blueberry or apricot tart. A scaled-down version of the marmot park is hefted onto the back of a lorry for the procession that evening.
Down town at the day’s end fondue at Café du Centre replaces all energy dispensed on the mountain and the unencumbered amount of hot cheese and wine twisted around bread prepares us for the following day’s cycling down Alps. As does a night in the warm, comfortable, wood-rich Hotel Suisse overlooking the street on one side and, on the other, mountains and the town’s sports centre.
The cable car out of Champéry goes every half an hour in the summer. You can buy a “Multi Pass” to play in the mountains at this time of year, starting at two Swiss francs or €2 a day if you stay in the right hotel but more realistically €8 a day. You can buy them by the day, week or season.
As departure time approaches more and more bikers board, the multi-pack visual treats making me feel even more of a soft novice. They stack bicycles beside each other so they domino across the suspended floor pinning people against the glassy wall.
"Breathe and uncurl your toes," instructs our champion teacher Petra Wiltshire as she takes us down our first run. How did she know my body had tensed into metaphorical retreat?
We’ve got bouncy kit – the bike’s front fork is a piston that absorbs undulations and the seat has its own spring; friends through the hard times. But legs have to work at shock-absorbing too because, sadly, we’re not allowed to sit down. The seat’s lowered out of bum-harm so, along with all the other work, we have to hover down the mountain (although I perfect a knees’ out restful stance on cruisy downhill sections). It’s easier if you relax and when things get really hairy you are permitted to gently squeeze the rear brakes before applying the front ones but should you jam the fronts on you’ll likely soar over the handlebars: that’ll teach you not to panic.
Wiltshire breaks us in gently for one run and then – having taken our bikes up a chairlift – we swallow the next one whole, climbing man-made wooden jumps and negotiating muddy cliff-paths until two people fall off (about 6ft down) onto a mountain road and the rest of us decide to take another route. Yet soon I start learning to trust my bike, in the same way as you must with skis: that it will wheel over the geological pandemonium beneath it. A sense of relaxation creeps in, followed by an ability to swoosh and turn and feel the thrill without terror.
We end the day lolling in the Thermes Parc spring-fed hot and cold pools down the valley at Val-d’Illiez; for muscle-freeing, medicinal purposes only, you understand.
Strength and fearlessness is built into many locals and those who come to "play" and push their boundaries in these parts, including the people responsible for the entertainment for National Day celebrations. Planting the fireworks involves ascending the Dents du Midi range in the dark and planting pyrotechnics to fire up the crowd. And – this is Switzerland after all – after the cleaning truck that follows the procession sweeps away any evidence of revelry detritus, the mountains explode into colour, streaking the black night and spotlighting the snow. It's a savage beauty that needs respect and care but – with that in place – mountains are fun and freeing.
GET THERE: Geneva Airport is 120km and an hour-and-a-half by car or you can take the train from the airport to Champéry
