ADVENTURE
WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY PETE SCULLION
Above two and a half thousand metres my body starts to wonder what I am doing to it. I was used to this by now, after a long week chasing Ben Jones and his pals around the French-Italian border. We’d topped out only days previously on what Ben held firm was “the best trail in the world”, and, while it certainly had everything you could want from a trail, including a spent 8in artillery shell, there was one trail that left me utterly speechless before we’d even turned a pedal.
After a long, sweaty climb out of the valley below, switchbacks making this tough ascent only marginally less hard work on tired legs, I could see Ben, Nash, Rich and Kate beckoning me from a tall spine of bright white limestone. The stone here looked almost like icing, nothing like the limestone of the tall, jagged peaks above. “You’ve got to see this,” insisted Ben. Ben had been here before though, I thought to myself… this must be something very special. As I made the last few steps to the summit, a cool two and a half kilometres above the deck, all I could see was a narrow ridge, pockmarked with sinkholes of all sizes. What really drew my eye though, was the thread of singletrack that wound its way delicately between them.
In places the ridge widened, but only relatively, and moved away from the lip of a cool, dark sinkhole but, for the most part, handlebars would be wider than the terra firma beneath them. Being big fans of massive landscapes and even bigger skies, it was some time before we were moving. The boney nature of the ridge ahead gave panoramic views as far as the eye could see. Glaciers could be seen twinkling in the hot September sun, and the 1,600-mile drive here didn’t seem quite so ridiculous now.