Bike trilogy - part I

I finally have time to sort-out things from two weeks ago. Thus, I will tell you about the bike trilogy from around that time. It everything started on one nice Thursday looking at weather forecast for next few weeks. As usual for Switzerland, weather was going to be very timely (read as "raining exclusively during weekend") and thus I decided I will take a holiday on Friday. And so on Friday I started my first bike trip from this trilogy.


 The trip was quite eventful. I started by getting into a wrong train. Seriously! I was standing on the platform and two trains come, one to Geneva and one to Brig. But they arrived at different tracks that was announced. So I tried to be clever and entered the one in the good direction. Except for the fact that they reversed both trains (although I was keeping an eye on potential change of the locomotive) and I ended up going to Geneva instead of Sierre.

My goal was to go from Sierre (540m) to Lac De Moiry(2250m). In order to avoid frequent main road towards Zinal, I decided to take less frequent one through Vercorin and Val d'Anniviers. This implied ascending another couple of hundreds of meters more (from Giettes d'en Bas (1460m) I descended to Mayoux (1200m)). From Mayoux it was tiresome climb, the ascent was quite steep and I was already tired from previous climb. Therefore I was stopping a lot to catch my breath. The last half a kilometer was especially steep and I was glad when I climbed through the final tunnel directly to the dam.

There I worked a few minutes with my mouth in order to increase my chemical energy. I did not stay too long however. The sun was hidden behind clouds, the temperature wasn't exactly 30 degrees and the wind made it even worse. To heat up, I continued on the road for another 4 kilometers to the small lake below the glacier where the road ended. Took several photos and quickly decided to go back because the weather did not look so great.

On my way back, I took a "shortcut" down on a mountain-bike road. Very great and steep descent (I was glad I did not choose this road for ascent). The only problem with the road was that my hand muscles were quite tired from braking all the time.

After stopping at Grimentz for some food and consequently discovered that there was some culture festival, I descended again to Mayaux where I took a more direct road to Sierre. Maybe a kilometer later, near small hydroelectric plant, I decided that instead of taking main road which climbed a few tens of meters I can take an asphalt road parallel to the stream. Never mind that it was marked as dead-end. There was a bike sign there and also my GPS was pretty convincingly routing me there. It was therefore a surprise when after maybe five kilometers the road suddenly ended with another hydroelectric plant and that was it. GPS was happy directing me over some hiking trail which was obviously used only rarely. With panic, I figured out that the best solution would be to use different hiking trail which climbed maybe 200 meters but at least seemed to be decent. With sweating, I started pushing my bike ...

And because it was so nice day, my bike decided to make me even happier. Suddenly, there was a crash. When I looked back, the bag holder above rear wheel wasn't above rear wheel, rather it was lying on the ground. Great, what a fortune! Fortunately it was only unscrewed and I managed to fix it with plastic wire used for organizing computer cables.

Back to pushing the bike. And swearing that I should better check tracks proposed by my GPS. Finally up to small willage Fang and back on asphalt road. The rest of the trip was just dreamy downhill!

As usual, you can find photos here.