Swiss Bliss

The acrid stink of burning brake compound, purpled steel and seared flesh rises through a cloud of man-sweat. In the Valais region of southwestern Switzerland, where grapes grow beside the Rhone River and cows with brass bells graze alpine meadows 8,000 feet above while gondolas, trains and chairlifts zip between the two with uncommon frequency, we've stopped because we had to. Our forearms are so pumped they could be full of spinach. Eyes are so watery and red they could be filled with sorrow. The trail beneath our tires is ancient. It is also perfect.

Formed by a scintilla of actions incremented to millions by great periods of time; 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 years-who knows?-it's possible Neanderthals roamed this path 10,000 years ago as the glaciers of the last Ice Age began to recede. Now, the trail is four-feet wide, worn that way by the traffic of civilizations come and gone. Primordial stones lie buried at each edge, packed one step at a time, one age after another. It contours downward through mountains carpeted by tall evergreen forest. And it is fast. On one side is a ditch with water trickling toward the Mediterranean, channeling its descent in and out of villages; past slate-roofed farmhouses and cafes; meadows; and views...always views.

Down and down, the trail's center worn to a smoothed rut from the plod of infinite footsteps, an effect that berms corners magnificently. Miraculously, almost sacrilegiously, this trail has no name, but it does indeed exist.

Rider: Andrew Shandro

What is perfect singletrack? You hear it often, from friends, guys at the bike shop and even right here in this magazine. What exactly is it? What does it look like? Feel like? How does it get there? Where is it? Perhaps these questions can be answered in Valais, a 2,000-square-mile region in the Pennine Alps on the eastern edge of Lake Geneva, home to Western Europe's highest peak, 15,771-foot Mont Blanc.

Ten mountain bikers have gathered in Valais to ride perfection...or at least that's what they've been told. With Whistler, British Columbia, native Chris Winter and lifetime Valais local Francois Panchard as guides, as well as a host of local Swiss rogues as companions, this band's mission is to pillage singletrack. All the while, no one is aware of what they are doing. "Why do those men laugh and hug?" the locals ask. "Why throw head skyward and scream with joy?" This voyage presents them with 80,000 vertical feet of descending in eight days. They are some of the first foreigners to ever experience Switzerland like this-to blend the modernity of lifts, the technology of all-mountain full suspension bikes and the antiquity of trails built from millenniums of leg, lung and foot.

Mountain bikers don't usually blow big cash on plane tickets to go halfway around the world to one of the planet's most expensive countries...just to ride a bike. Surfers go to budget beaches. Climbers dirtbag on desolate peaks. Mountain bikers go to Utah. What would make riders like Wade Simmons and Andrew Shandro leave the world-class trails of their North Shore backyard? Why would a government statistician blow off his fiancee, half of his vacation time, and a good chunk of his savings to ride in the same clothes for more than a week? Why would a bike shop manager from Whistler leave A-Line? Our stories could all be laced back to friends who had their minds blown on a trip to Valais last year. They promised perfection.

Three years ago, 32-year-old Chris Winter, an entrepreneur and avid rider, started looking into guiding bike tours in the Swiss Alps, a place he spent a portion of his childhood skiing, a place he always had an infatuation for. His quest led him to 34-year-old Francois Panchard-a fellow not normal by Swiss standards.

The son of a mountain climber, Panchard's freaky green eyes and conniving grin belies a certain imbalance. He is not following the footsteps of his 30-something peers, taking high profile jobs in New York and Paris, making heaps of cash in Geneva playing with oil baron cash, driving BMWs with in-dash DVD players and wearing designer clothes and fancy watches.

Instead, Panchard runs his own CD-ROM trail mapping business, spending day after day documenting the labyrinth of singletrack that drapes his country like a giant gill net. He lives high in the mountains in a tiny little cabin with his beautiful Hungarian wife, and almost every summer day he explores his homeland by bike. In the last four years, he has gone from a tight, light cross-country rig (the Swiss mountain bike of choice) to a four-and-four all-mountain machine with disc brakes and wide rubber. Even still, he wants more suspension. Like I said, he is not a stereotypical Swiss.

Panchard knows something most of his countrymen don't. He is one of the very first in Switzerland to discover what could be the greatest jewel in the mountain bike universe. Lifts. Yes, lifts. Ski lifts, gondolas, tiny double chairs, trams, quads, funiculars, trains that go to 12,000 feet. Hundreds of them. Everywhere. Idiot, you say, that's easy. You've skied at Swiss resorts that have hundreds of lifts. You've traveled 50 miles in a day and barely walked. Everybody knows that. But that is winter. In summer it is a landscape dominated by hikers. Mountain bikers are nowhere to be seen.

"The Swiss mountain biker rides up the gravel road and down the gravel road," explains Panchard. "They don't ride singletrack and they think lifts are for wimps." But Panchard, like he's done most of his life, has gone against the traditionalist ways of his countrymen and swallowed his pride. He rides lifts with his bike all the time. Almost all of them-of which there are hundreds-allow bikes, some on platforms, some on little hooks, some you have to hold yourself. From the top of each one spreads a weave of hiking trails, cow paths and doubletrack that meander through some of the world's most spectacular mountains. Some traverse, some go up, but once you've won an elevation of 8,000 to 10,000 feet, most go down-for a long way.

Worn smooth since the Dark Ages, by a people confined to a relatively small, rugged and mountainous land, with a knack for perfection and industry, the Swiss have made a labyrinth of walking paths, many linking farms and churches and villages from peak to valley bottom. And just like everything else Swiss, they are of superb quality. This is a country obsessed with time, so it makes sense everything is built with an ageless quality-local villages even hire unemployed residents to rake and manicure its proximate trail network. There are some 42,000 miles of them, naturally contoured and wonderfully irrigated, with drinking fountains and benches in the farthest reaches of every valley. But they are also special for another reason: Very few have ever seen the roll of knobby rubber. They are virgin, fresh, unspoiled. Yes, Panchard is a lone sailor on a sea of gold.