So in the summer of 2022 I meant to ride my mountain bike through the French Alps. I got as far as Paris, fell sick in the heat, went home and ended up riding in England’s Lake District instead.
I was following this route, which is really best for people with very light mountain bikes and next to no kit, or possibly just for hikers, as it goes up and over steep ridges on stony tracks. The hills and lakes are very scenic and it’s an enjoyable journey if you don’t mind pushing your bike uphill.
About halfway up Black Sail Pass the path became so steep that even pushing was too hard and I had to unload my camping gear and carry it up the slope then go back down, grab my bike and carry it up in turn. While this was happening I learned from passing hikers that Tom Cruise was filming in Buttermere, over the next ridge but one.
Reader, my world changed. No longer was I an eccentric person who, for some reason, had opted to lug 25-odd kilos of bike and luggage up a sheep track which even the sheep didn’t seem to be using. Now I was an adventurer who laughs at hardship, like the Great Star himself.
Coming downhill, which at one point involved climbing about six or eight feet down what was more or less a rockface with the bike dangling absurdly in one hand like a giant two-wheeled hiking pole, I began to daydream about meeting Tom Cruise coming up, perhaps taking a break from filming at the lake to scale a peak or something.
“Afternoon, Mr Cruise, Sir, just lugging my bike over this mountain, as you do. The bike and my camping gear, because I also camp. In the mountains, yes. I bet you do that sort of thing before breakfast, Mr Cruise, Sir.” And with that famous twinkle in his eye, the Great Star would mutter something approving and jump onto the nearest cliff face, leaving me to float down the hill on a cloud of stardust and head to the local pub to trade in my anecdote.
Crawly bumlick, as we used to say in primary school. I didn’t meet Tom Cruise, whose name could be heard all over Buttermere for the rest of that day like a whisper on the wind. I did get some pics of the film crew’s helicopters (the tiny white things in the left-centre of the field) which were taking off from time to time to do something stunty over the lake. They had two white choppers, one of which might have been the other’s stand-in, and a black or brown one which I suppose was for fishing stunt performers out of the water, if need be.
If you’ve seen that promo of Cruise training to ride a motorbike off a cliff and then paraglide to safety, which he apparently did countless times, then it’s easy to imagine him climbing a mountain with a mountain bike in one hand. He would probably run up.
I made it to the French Alps this year and in a campsite at a town called Valloire, which has dazzling starry skies at night, I met a Frenchman who knew of a way to get a mountain bike up the Col du Galibrier without using the tarmac road which the Tour de France goes up.
This turned out to involve four hours of pushing our bikes up a side-valley which leads to the pass – me, again, with all that camping gear attached. We would ride our bikes for ten metres at the most, get off and push, then ride a bit more, with the ratio heavily in favour of pushing. But it was, for all the strenuous effort, an amazing experience to be up in the high mountains, entirely under our own steam, in a valley above 5,000 feet which was empty but for us, a woman herding sheep and her toddler son. Each of the sheep had a bell hung around its neck so that when the herd moved, the sound flowing down the valley was of wind chimes, blending with the rippling of a mountain stream. And there was, just about, still snow up there.
We came out on the road a thousand feet or so below the Col and rode the rest of the way on tarmac while being overtaken by road cyclists on much lighter bikes. At the top, which is nearly 9,000 feet up, you’re surrounded by peaks and ridges stretching to the horizon in every direction and the feeling of attainment is exhilarating. No Tom Cruise in sight, it has to be said, but better than that: a blue-graded (easy) mountain bike track, which enabled us to freewheel all the way down to the valley. Not a superstar stunt, true: just a normal and fantastic adventure, lucky us.
Puck 