No Place For Bicycles: Climbing a cliff with James McKnight

Never mind, Where The Trail Ends, this is more a case of Where The Hell Is The Trail?!

Dirt contributor James McKnight, Nick Maher and Tony Gaskin went on a truly bonkers off piste adventure using their bicycles as make shift ice axes as they hauled themselves up a vertical cliff face all in the search for an epic descent.

The full story of this insane mission is in the latest issue of Dirt Magazine, issue #128. So you need to go and buy that first. Then when you’ve it you can watch the video!

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The sweep

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Here’s what the EuroPikeStar says:

So we left the comfort of our chalet in Morzine (Riders Refuge, by the way) and decided to go on a little ‘jaunt’ into the mountains that sit directly behind Champery. I won’t tell you where we went exactly or the route we took to get there for fear of someone getting the wrong idea and attempting to replicate our stupidity.

I should probably go no further without some sort of disclaimer: “Don’t do anything like this, bikes aren’t made for scaling cliffs and the idiots in this video clearly have no idea of mountain safety etiquette so take nothing from it aside from a lesson in how to get into a sticky situation”.

Fortunately our whole ‘ride’ went with no problems whatsoever and it took us a mere ten hours to cover the eight kilometres to our destination; a hut high up in the mountains above Champery and toward Chamonix. The finer details are in the video and in my words in Dirt #128.