As above really, what type of helmet for a week in Les Arcs?

Actually I’ll be taking both types, but I realised my helmets are really old (’07 and ’09) and need changing but I’ve spent all my pocket money on a new bike and might only be able to upgrade one of them.

Get a bell super 2 r and then you have both.

lift-assisted riding ?

Full face IMO – it’s rocky enough to make a mess of your purdy li’l face and the trails are (were 10yrs ago) potentially quite fast

Xc lid will be fine. At least that’s all I took when I did a week there a few years ago

Full-face if you’ve got it. I only reverted to XC lid for a backcountry day where pedalling was involved. However there was a mix in our group, some wore XC for the whole 2 weeks.

If you’re just smashing out the marked DH runs off the Fun-ik-ular / lifts then a proper full facer make sense. But if you’re spending time away from the main runs, on the more off piste stuff, an open face is nicer to ride in.

2R or similar is good compromise, but if you’re hitting the bigger DH stuff, i’d still wear a proper FF……..

Everyone in our group a few years ago wore xc lids. Mixture of the marked DH trails and backcountry stuff. We weren’t hanging about.

Last year I survived with a XC lid,but I was wishing I had a F/F at times,next time I’d take a 2R

Both, really depends on you and what your doing though. Some of the stuff and be a bit hairy out there and if you day trip to somewhere like la thuile with the lifts then a FF would be better.

I always ride with an “xc” lid, I don’t ride too much bike park and only small jumps. So my answer really is is depends what riding you want to do. If you don”t have elbow/knee pads I’d buy those before a new helmet assuming yours is in reasonable knick

Sorry for hijacking this thread but I was looking at Les Arcs last night (musing over it for next year). I’m used to UK Trail Centre grading so seeing

Green/Blue/Red/Black in DH
Green/Blue/Red/Black in Enduro

How does the DH/Enduro split compare against a typical UK Centre say for example Mabie/Dalbeattie/Llandegla etc?

I’d say the red starts some point beyond where UK Trail centre black finishes

weeks worth of Les Arcs, trail addiction last year and all of our group were wearing normal helmets. There was a purely lift assisted DH group who all had DH bikes and they all had full face helmets.

I suppose it boils down to… Are you likely to fall on your face?

I don’t think it matters too much what trails you ride – its more about your frame of mind. If you intend to push your limits and ride above your pay grade then body Armour and Full face is recommended. If you intend to ride within yourself (i.e. a little slower and maybe not attempting absolutely everything you come across) then normal equipment will be fine. Remember you can walk around stuff.

For example…I’m going to Les Arcs to ride some back country epics for three days this July. This will be normal riding gear. Then I’m going to Megavelanche straight after where I will don body Armour and full face lid. The trails are not much different but my mentality will be.

The main differences between Les Arcs and the Uk is, funnily enough, the gradient and length of the difficult parts of the trail!

For example, even the red “XC” trail down from Arc1800 to the river below drops pretty much 1000m, the same as coming off the top of Snowdon! So managing your energy / velocity is much more important than for the vast majority of trails in the uk.

In the UK, trails tend sot get rated by there most difficult feature, so you can have RED trail that is 4km of flat, wide, packed stone track, but has a 50yard long rock garden and hence it’s a red.

In France (and even more so Italy) the trails are graded by there average difficulty, and can have features on them that would be above there average grading.

Blueadvocate, grading is a bit mixed. The dh graded black is harder than the enduro black we did, however parts of the enduro red trail were just as hard as the black! The enduro tracks had more of an off piste feel, and I’d say were graded the same as a proper Scottish black. I rode open face lid and just knee pads, the only place I felt under kitted was the black dh stuff.

Thanks all, hard to say what we’ll be riding – we’re renting a self-catering thing so no guide on-hand but we plan to find one for more back country stuff, but we’ll be riding the DH stuff too, mostly on big trail bikes (Capras, T275s, Bronsons).

I tend to favour FF unless it’s a pedally trail, I don’t mind taking a ff off to grind up some fireroads or something, but mostly we like lift up and ride down. Les Arcs is new to us, but we’ve been to PDS countless times and Whister.

Perhaps I’ll give up my TroyLee lids in favour of a 661 FF and some sort of ‘AM’ style XC lid, I just can’t get over how they cost these days! FFs seem much better value now – D2s seem half the price they were when I bought my last one nearly 10 years ago, but the XC lids are twice what I thought they cost – £100 seems to be entry level for one that protects the back of your head.

Thanks for the answers on trail grading

Always open face for me in les arcs itself… But fullface for la thuile and pila (not because they’re that much harder, more because I get more carried away there).

Depends on you though. We’ve usually escaped the bike park trails, the other stuff is mostly harder but slower and less jumpy.

Nothing in les arcs that is harder than the lakes 😉