I have just got back from a family holiday in the Austrian Alps, we went to an area called Saalbach-Hinterglem to do mountaineering, walking and downhill biking. This post will cover the downhill biking but the other two will be appearing at some point over the next few days.
It is great biking in the alps as instead of having to spend ages pushing heavy downhill bikes to the top like in the UK and just because you do not cycle uphill does not mean it is not tiring, Especially when the runs have up to 1000m vertical descent and in a few hours you do 5000, of descent!
The biking there was great and I did a mixture of biking with people I met on the lifts, with the owners of the chalet we were staying in and my family/friends. It is the first time I have ridden in the Alps with my camera and I am very pleased that I did! The runs were a great mixture of fast flowing open sections and very technical sections in woods. When I rode the x-Line which is the route with 1000m of vertical descent after a lot of rain the wooded technical section on the lower half which was tricky in the dry became amazingly fun though even harder, as in order to get down brakes had to be used very sparingly or else you would just slide down the roots and off the track.
During the holiday I had a few pretty hard falls and learnt a few valuable lessons in the process though I am sure that I will make the same mistakes again, such as showing off for a camera! Though for a second year in a row no one ended up in hospital which is a big improvement as in the 4 years before at least one person if not two had ended up in hospital!
It is going to be a shock to the system when I go out in the UK again and have to do lots of hard work to get to the top for much shorter runs. Though for now here is a small selection of my biking photos from the trip.
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