“Routine”, sniffs Frederick William Jacomb in the 1862 edition of the Alpine Club journal, “still appears to be the influence which directs the great tourist tide that ebbs and flows between those centres of Alpine attraction — Zermatt and Chamounix.” Jacomb was a respected lawyer, a climber and a leading member of the Alpine Club, the world’s oldest mountaineering society, which had been founded in London five years previously. You can practically hear his Victorian moustache bristling as he laments the lack of adventurous spirit among his countrymen. “Even in the Alps,” he writes, most people never venture off the most “hackneyed tracks”.
Thankfully, he writes, Alpine Club members are made of sterner stuff. “Within the last few years, a bolder spirit has animated our mountaineers,” his article continues. “During the seasons of 1860 and 1861, an entirely new route has been opened out, not only connecting the two centres, but offering the additional advantage of exploring some of the most noble glaciers and snowfields to be met with in the Alps.” Mapped out for the first time in that 1862 journal, this “new High Level route” over the mountains between Chamonix and Zermatt would quickly become known by its French name: the Haute Route.
Fast-forward 160 years, and it’s hard to know what Jacomb would make of the Haute Route today. Specifically designed as an alternative to overly trafficked tourist trails, the route is now the most famous in the Alps — and a victim of its own success. Jacomb’s original itinerary is hugely popular with ski tourers, thousands of whom follow it each spring. In summer, the mountain huts where travellers stay are often fully booked up to a year in advance — mainly by hikers following a simplified version known as the Walker’s Haute Route.
“It’s become a brand,” says Maxence Carron, who grew up in Martigny, a Swiss town roughly equidistant from Chamonix and Zermatt. “It’s super famous, and I mean, it is really something you need to do once in a lifetime,” he adds. But these days, there’s nothing new or novel about the Haute Route. Or at least, there wasn’t, until Carron and Adrià Mercadé, his friend and business partner, came up with the idea of riding it on electric mountain bikes.
If Lime bikes and the like have changed the way people cycle around cities in recent years, their off-road equivalents have revolutionised mobility in the mountains. Walking paths and animal tracks that were once unthinkably steep have suddenly become rideable, and mountain bikers can now tackle much longer itineraries: like the Haute Route.
The idea of riding the route on eMTBs, as they’re known, first came to Carron and Mercadé shortly after they met on a bike-packing trip in Mongolia in 2016. “The trip was kind of sketchy and we shared a tent,” Carron remembers. Bonds were formed, and they decided to start a company, aiming to offer similar multi-day cycling experiences, but closer to home and better organised. “I don’t know if we were the very first to ride the Haute Route on eMTBs,” Carron tells me over a beer, the night before I set off on one of their guided Haute Route rides myself, “but we were definitely the first to offer it to visitors.” Having scoped the route themselves in October 2018, they welcomed their first guests the following summer. Recently, E-Alps became a family firm, when Mercadé married Carron’s sister.
At the start, Carron remembers, the bikes were heavy and the batteries struggled to cope with even a half-day’s riding. “It was near the beginning, not of e-bikes, but of e-mountain bikes,” he says. As their guest numbers grew, however, the technology improved. Today, E-Alps guides “something like 250” clients each summer — many of them from the US and Canada, where the allure of the Haute Route “brand” is particularly strong — and each guest is equipped with the latest enduro eMTBs.
The Flyer Uproc Evo: X bikes that our group of 10 will be riding are serious bits of kit. Costing £10,500 each, they have 170mm of suspension travel — enough to tackle the rowdiest downhills — and wheels arranged in the “mullet” configuration that’s currently fashionable in mountain biking: there’s a larger, 29-inch rim at the front, which rolls over roots and rocks easily, and a smaller, 27.5-inch one at the back for added manoeuvrability. The bike’s motors, built by Bosch, produce up to 85 Newton metres of torque and the batteries provide a whopping 750 watt-hours of power. But we’ll need all that, and then some.
“We plan for two batteries per person, per day,” Carron explains, with the spares carried in a support van and swapped out at lunch. The route we’ll follow — basically the Walker’s Haute Route “with some adaptations to make it more fun for bikes”, according to Carron — involves climbing between 1,500 to 2,700 vertical metres every day for a week, and covering nearly 250-300km in total.
As an experienced mountain biker, but a complete newbie when it comes to eMTBs, I can scarcely believe the power in my pedals as we ride away from the start line in Chamonix. We quickly encounter a steep section of trail. The kind I’d normally expect to dismount and push up. Instead, I simply switch from “eco” to “turbo” mode with a flick of my thumb and carry on pedalling as before. I’m giggling as I reach the top. It just feels ludicrous.
Although this new technology makes anything seem possible, crossing the Alps still presents a formidable challenge. eMTBs might ease the leg-burn of the long climb from Le Tour at 1,450 metres to the Col de Balme, on the French-Swiss border, but the switchbacks are still sweaty work. And not even turbo mode can do anything about the weather.
“Before we arrived at the Col de Balme, heavy rain had set in all along the valley of Chamouni, [sic]” wrote Alfred Wills, one of the explorers of the original Haute Route in 1860, “and soon after we reached the little hostelry, an impenetrable mist came rolling up from the valley of Trient, shrouding in its cold grey folds every part of the prospect; the barometer fell still lower, and everything looked as badly for the morrow as it could do.” He could almost have been describing the exact scene that greets our group a century and a half later.
“It’s like mountain biking in Scotland, eh?” says Boris Monseur, our lead bike guide, grinning at me and the other Briton in the group. He has called a halt outside the historic mountain hut mentioned by Wills, which we might otherwise have missed in the thick fog. “If we could choose, we wouldn’t have this as the first downhill of the week,” Monseur says, “because it’s also one of the most ‘technical’.” Another grin. “And with these conditions . . . ” he trails off.
Thankfully, our group is relatively experienced. Everyone proves capable of handling the mud, no one gets lost in the mist and by the time we reach the end of the single-track descent, 1,000 vertical metres below, we’re all grinning.
It helps that E-Alps are experts at both logistics and group dynamics. Alongside Monseur, we have two more guides, Vincent Boucon and Fredy Chouin, who take it in turns to hang back and sweep up stragglers. Meanwhile Italians Renato Ferra and Fabio Salvestroni man the support van, which is waiting for us at the end of our ride out in Trient. They’ve brought not just fresh batteries, but an elaborate spread of food, so we can recharge too.
After a stop for pre-prepared sandwiches on the climb, this is our second lunch of the day — but given the rain we’ve been riding through, both the French onion soup and the strong Italian coffee brewed by Ferra and Salvestroni feel necessary. After all, we’ve still got a climb up to the Col de la Forclaz, followed by another epic descent through slate-roofed villages and green vineyards before we can call it a day at Martigny.
It’s not until the third day of the trip that the sun comes out, by which time a real rapport has grown up among the group. The beauty of riding eMTBs is that Brent Yahn, a self-effacing Californian who’s the oldest member of the group at 66, can keep up with Vijay Howe, the 20-year-old Canadian who’s the youngest. At least on the uphills.
On the downhills, Howe streaks ahead. “Rub it in, why don’t you, showing up your old man,” chuckles his father, Jan Neuspiel, a British Columbia-based heliski guide, who is no slouch on a bike himself. The only guest who can really give young Vijay a run for his money is Duncan Lee, a professional freestyle snowmobile rider from California.
The rest of the group — mostly solo travellers, who’ve booked by themselves — are not quite so extreme. But everyone has an interesting story to tell, whether it’s the reinsurance executive, the rocket scientist, or the retired vet. If e-bikes help break down age barriers, they’re great for breaking social barriers too. There’s plenty of opportunity for extended chats while we’re climbing and for friendly encouragement on the more difficult descents — which Boris Monseur insists on describing as “flowy” (a mountain bike term meaning smooth, with fast, wide turns) even when they’re anything but.
On day four, we climb the Col de Torrent, the highest point of the Haute Route at 2,919 metres, in appropriately torrential rain. As we make our way down above a steep drop, on a stretch of single-track slicked with mud, everyone except Lee and Howe dismounts. “Tell me Boris,” says Lee when we catch up with them at the bottom, “does ‘flow’ mean something different in French?”
The sense of camaraderie is reinforced by the sleeping arrangements. E-Alps never skimp on comfort — for example, guests can skip any section they don’t fancy, and ride with the support van — but the hotels we stay in en route have been deliberately chosen, Maxence Carron explains, “to mix luxury with giving you the sense of adventure”. So in Nendaz, after a day riding the sculpted trails of the 4 Valleys Ski area, we stay in a four-star hotel with an enormous indoor-outdoor pool, and at least three saunas. Whereas our final night is spent in the Moos-Alphütte, a rustic log cabin by the side of a button lift in the tiny ski resort of Bürchen. There’s a homemade hot tub out the back, and cold beers on ice when we arrive, but the hut itself is just a single room, with an extended bunk bed running down one side. We sleep five abreast, as you would in a mountain refuge — our dreams made weirder by the cheese fondue the guides themselves have cooked over the gas-fired stove.
The weather for the week of our trip, towards the end of September, is frequently less than ideal. But the warmth of the welcome each evening more than makes up for it. In the tiny hamlet of Les Haudères, reached via an incredible ride down goat tracks and through farmers’ fields, we’re welcomed at the family-run Hôtel Les Mélèzes by Claudia Anzévui — who not only pours the perfect post-ride pint, but also plays classic chansons françaises on her accordion.
Our penultimate night is spent in the historic Hôtel Weisshorn, 2,337 metres above the Val d’Anniviers. Built in 1882, the 30-room property is testament to the long presence of tourists on these high-altitude trails. The interiors have been maintained in their original style, and you don’t have to squint much to imagine Jacomb or his fellow Alpine Club members creaking across the wooden floorboards, playing whist at the card table, or perhaps tinkling the ivories of the antique piano — which apparently took six men to carry up the hill.
The final descent towards Zermatt zigzags down for more than 1,200 vertical metres from the tree line to the village of Kalpetran, at the entrance to the Matter Valley. It features some of the tightest, most exhilarating switchbacks we’ve ridden all week. Our hands are cramping by the time we reach the bottom — a phenomenon mountain bikers call “death grip” — but as we high-five each other, Neuspiel grins. “Phew! Makes you feel alive, doesn’t it?”
All that remains is a long, steady climb along the banks of the Vispa river towards the famous triangular form of the Matterhorn at the head of the valley. “There are a few steeper bits of uphill still,” announces Boris Monseur, “but don’t worry, they’re quite flowy.” There’s an inevitable outbreak of laughter, but Monseur is actually serious. “Bosch, who make the motors, had this advertising campaign which was all about ‘uphill flow’,” he explains.
As I follow him up a winding section of uphill — smoothly, with fast, wide turns — I can understand what he, and Bosch, mean. This really is completely different from any kind of mountain biking I’ve tried before.
The route between Chamonix and Zermatt might have become almost as hackneyed as the tracks that Frederick William Jacomb and his fellow pioneers sought to avoid, but these machines offer a new way to tackle it, a fresh perspective, and an experience that has been anything but routine.
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