Occurs to me that this may not be a bad place to advertise the idea – open to suggestions. We have a small, well kitted out house in the middle of the mountains of the French Pyrenees, an hour south of the gorgeous city of Pau. The house is perfectly situated for mountain biking being based up at 500m elevation at the foot of some pretty major mountains – forestry road is straight from the foot of the driveway. Tour de France passes nearby as well for all you roadies.

So the place is not used nearly enough and would greatly benefit from being used more often. We keep toiling with the idea of renting it but the time has probably come for this. Biking market would be perfect – it’s a great location for mountain biking straight out the door and I’d certainly appreciate some folks with more time than me exploring the trail options.

It’s a gorgeous spot, truly relaxing in the way only the french do so well and loads to do in the surrounding areas – hot springs, lakeside beaches etc etc.

2-3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, wood stove, full kitchen, plenty of bike repair tools (even a couple of mid range mountain bikes). Would be looking to make this available at a fairly small charge simply to keep the place occupied and cover the cleaning and preparation costs.

EMail in profile – happy to discuss options with anybody interested at all. Can easily send on some photos

Cheers

@gav – sounds lovely. You are better off getting it on an owners-direct type website and highlighting the biking possibilities than just targeting the (somewhat niche) biking market via here. Be a bit careful with tools / bikes, stuff will sadly go missing / get broken.

YGM

Nice. Ask stw towers if this is ok mind otherwise everyone and their dog will be advertising services from S&M home services to home rental.

Stick it on leboncoin.fr. Lots of french use it to find holiday rentals.

Good advice guys and thanks for the tips (including asking STW permission) The place is managed for us by a local (brit) road bike holiday outfit nearby so it’s not entirely informal. Tools etc going walkabout tho is a fair point.

The french holiday makers are an entirely different crowd – it’s a not a bad option and one we do look at but the UK crowd is arguably easier to co-ordinate, deal with and, TBH, will really appreciate the place for much the same reason that we do – mountains and biking. Never ceases to amaze me the disconnect between mountain biking in UK and abroad – the popularity, access and support in some of these epic locations is still very much early days / non-existent.

SOunds bloomin lovely, I’m BM’ing this..

Do you “allow” roadies 😆

I’m maybe talking it up a bit – need to post a photo or two. Roadies welcome – really it’s an incredible spot for this to the point that I have two road bikes here in Scotland bought to go there for us.

Long story but when we bought the place some 8yrs ago or so the mtb’ng at the time there seemed a bit disappointing. Too wild and too ‘epic’. That was back then and – more specifically – was short travel ‘full’ suss as the norm. These days I’m seeing that the latest breed of bikes may well open up some incredible riding to the point that I’m driving down next month to test the theory on a thoroughly modern ‘AM’ bike.

I rode the Roc d’Ossau fully rigid on one occasion and on a tandem another time. Madame did every edition winning ladies a few times. Any bike with good brakes will do, I usually use a race hardtail because I can’t face pedaling an extra three kilos of tippy back suspension bike. They are big hills and take an hour or two to get up so anyone who isn’t happy doing 1500m vertical will find it frustrating or just plain exhausting. It was about 30°C riding up le Marie Blanque yesterday and will reach mid thirties by the end of July which can make things hard work if you’re not fit and skinny.

My favourite ride above your place is les Cinq Monts, traversing across to the singletrack Roc d’Ossau descent into Bielle. The only uplifts are in Gourette and Artouste (where you can rent descent bikes without pedals in the latter) and the descents in those resorts aren’t great.

So if you’re a fit roadie or X-C MTBer go for it, if not go somewhere like Morzine. An Pyrenean alternative is the Lutin in Luchon.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wu-QqvhegQ[/video]

Not me, honest.

You’ll find plenty more Roc d’Ossau vids which covered the best riding in the valley

Edukator – some really great advice, sounds like you are a great contact for riding down this way, if you don’t mind I’ll drop you an email. Good shout on the heat though – we’re down in a couple of weeks but I suspect that i may be being overly ambitious about riding in July, being a cold blooded scot.

I have done a lot of riding on the Spanish side just over from Artouste – Huesca, Jaca area with Doug Macdonald which has just blown me away with the quality of the riding. I am sure that we have some great trails on the French side but what little there is does seem heavily geared toward pretty tough XC riding.

We are close to Gourette and I have considered the uplifts there – Artouste seems all about the pedal-less DH fun bikes – Also spoken with AQR about getting over Luchon.

So much to do so little time… (the reality is we spend a lot of time enjoying family there, soaking up the relaxed atmosphere and of course working on house maintenance…)

I’ll take a look at the videos. Really appreciated.

I’m not sure how much time I’ll be around in July. My son should be there from mid month entertaining for the commune des Eaux Bonnes Gourette. Ask him to play “On My Cloud” if he’s singing at any of the Summer events you go to and he’ll give you my e-mail.

Not sure how close you are to Hautacam but there is an absolutely outstanding 28k decent off the top
dropping down to the lake. Well worth a visit if your close by

There you go Rob, I will drop you an email with directions to the start point

Perfect BigHills, thanks. I think I saw this route on the IGN Carte – will check it out later this month when we’re down.

Much appreciated.