You don’t *need* lifts, but given a lot of the longer rides involve 4 or 5 lifts, going up several hundred metres at a time, you’d have to be a climbing god to get the best out of the area we were in. In 5 days of riding unicycles in Morzine, we did over 10,000 metres of descent, I hate to think how much it’d hurt if we’d have had to ride 10,000 metres of ascent too. To put it in perspective, that’s significantly more than the height of Everest, and we were only slow unicyclists – on bikes with their fancy freewheels and suspension and all that, we could easily have done double that.
Even with lifts, you end up doing a fair bit of climbing on most of the decent xc routes.
The lifts are also jolly cheap for a weeks pass, I bet if you headed out there, you’d be too tempted not to pay up in the end.
Joe