Amazing photos alert! Dan Milner’s ‘Monster’ hike-a-bike

“What exactly are we searching for? A mystical Valhalla of singletrack?”

Words & photos Dan Milner

What is it that drives us to seek adventure? What urges us to pedal and push into new surroundings and embrace the unknown challenges they harbour? Why do we bust a gut slinging bikes on to sweaty backs to scale impossibly steep mountains in search of… well, what exactly?

What exactly are we searching for? A mystical Valhalla of singletrack? Maybe. Or is it the chance to learn more about ourselves —and the strength of friendships— when the proverbial sh*t hits the fan?

Adventure’s roots are simple. Plain curiosity has been the drive behind adventure for millennia, encouraging early Polynesian sailors to venture beyond the safe horizon thousands of years before we started steering wheels into the excitement of backcountry unknowns. However and wherever we access adventure, the rewards of new experiences encountered along the way have always been the payback for the risks taken.

And those rewards come in many guises —physical, mental and emotional— but while everyone has their own unique threshold for defining when “adventure” actually kicks in, could there be more than mere curiosity behind our apparent hunger to embrace the discomfort, whether physical or psychological, that always seems to go hand in hand with adventure?

I mean, WTF makes us keep going, trudging onward in a train of pain, just to shiver in a tent, or downclimb a vertical cliff face with a bike in hand? Why do we keep pushing it, and what makes us keep coming back for more? It has got to be more than curiosity, right?

Even after 40-plus years playing this game, I’m still mystified by the driving force behind my appetite for adventure, and my willingness to keep going when the type 2 fun has just gone on too long. I’m intrigued by how much of this appetite comes from conscious decision making and calculations —the “if we just push over the pass, we’ll have even more of a banger of a descent”— and how much from the subconscious; something that stirs deep inside? Could there be something trapped within us that seeks to overcome reasoning, that banishes normal desires to retreat towards comfort and instead embraces the layered, nuanced battle between masochism and reward? An inner creature of our own making perhaps, that rises within and seeks to take control; a monster with super-human ambitions? We all know the urban myth of the young mum lifting a car with her bare hands to free her trapped infant beneath.

Overturned cars and screaming toddlers aside, where better to explore this idea than high above the Mer de Glace glacier, in the Chamonix valley —the very glacier that provided the stage for Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein confronting his nemesis, the ‘abhorred’, powerful monster he has created but tried to shun.

On the ground, inevitably, and of for the sake of authenticity, to properly explore a story of inner and outward struggle meant embracing a serious, steep four-hour hike-a-bike to reach our chosen high alpine bivouac spot. Joined by Ludo May and Graham Pinkerton, our ascent becomes a mix of granny-ring grind and awkward bike manoeuvring through jumbles of boulders and tangled tree stumps. To be blunt, it’s a grunt.

We break the treeline late afternoon to pass a crowded hubbub of tourists whisked here effortlessly by a cog railway. Come 5 pm they’ll all have descended the same way, without breaking a sweat, to retire to comfy hotel beds. Would any of them even consider sleeping up here among the granite boulders and heather, in the company of marmots and chamois and wolves?

But for us a rudimentary ledge is our hotel for tonight, paid for by sweat and a few expletives. We roll out our sleeping mats among the boulders and look down on a valley carpeted with twinkling lights. We feel no envy. Opposite us the mighty peak of the Dru slides into alpenglow, while below it, somewhere edging slowly into the inky shadows of jagged, towering peaks is Frankenstein’s glacier: a huge tongue of cracked ice that has been groaning and grinding its way through rocks for millennia. Cold. Relentless. Unstoppable.

We pass around the hip flask of single malt, and laugh about the efforts of our climb. Humour is a great softener to pain. And we marvel at our setting; sitting trying to absorb the views, we wonder how it looked to Shelley during her visit here in 1816, the shrinking ice spectacle now a shadow of its former snarling glory.

As the altitude chill finally reaches our drying sweat we’re forced into sleeping bags, and lie back on a silent mountain. We have this hill to ourselves. Tomorrow we have 1200 metres of vertical to descend. Twelve-hundred metres of smiles and laughs, of tests of nerve, balance and skills. They will be twelve-hundred metres of opportunity: for our rewards of our labours to be reaped, and for the monster within to be laid to rest, again.

Monster.
Riders: Ludo May, Graham Pinkerton, Dan Milner
Story & direction: Dan Milner
Videography & edit: Rob Grew.
Additional drone footage: Katie Moore.