Day 2

Day 2 was rough. After we toured around Old Town Geneva, we took the train out to Mies to drop off our bike boxes, then took one of our duffel bags to Martigny to stash it in a locker until we left for Chamonix. It was evening by the time we rolled into Sion. Our book said it was a quite little sleepy town but it was the opposite! There must have been something going on in town because their were young people everywhere. We tried our hand at French and ate at a very good restaurant that served a lot of Italian foods. After a few post dinner drinks we rode over to the hostel only to find they were booked solid with no available beds. We then checked about 5 more hotels and found they were all booked as well! Then it started to rain pretty hard. So, out came our rain coats. It was quite late by this time and I was pretty tired. No hotels meant finding some dry spot to sleep. We rode down 5 floors of a brand new parking garage and slept in the corner of the stairwell all night. It was very clean, dry, and warm at least. Derek got maybe an hour of sleep, I got way more. We were up at the crack of dawn for our next adventure. From Sion we went to Kandersteg with a stop in Brig for a few pictures.





Once in Kandersteg we did our first INSANELY steep ride. We rode up to Oeschinen Lake which sits at 5191'. It's really probably a better hike because it is so steep. It is easily 30% grade in a lot of spots. It made for very slow going, but hey, all we had was time.

That is the village of Kandersteg way down in the valley. At this point we were only halfway up the trail.



Giant snowmelt waterfalls and rivers ran down into the valley.



We are headed up there!





That's Hotel Oeschinensee across the lake.





Here I am enjoying the singeltrack around the lake.



Random shot along the trail.