WHITE LINES
I look down at the tangle of man and machine. It’s like stumbling across a piece of weird interpretive art. “There’s a funny off-camber bit there,” Jez squeaks as an excuse for how his face came to be buried in the snow and his arms are now clawing, crab-like, at the bike that’s on top of him. Drifting off the hard-packed centre line of the trail and slipping his front wheel into the axle-deep soft snow to the side had meant an ungainly dismount. He picks himself up, dusts off the snow and we set off again. Needless to say we’ll be blaming ‘funny off-camber bits’ a few more times during the rest of this 280-vertical-metre descent.
Like Jez’s impromptu cyborg-like installation in the woods, the act of riding on snow is quite a unique art form – but luckily it’s one that, to me at least, is more humorous than earnest; more Banksy than Constable. However it’s interpreted, over the last few years I’ve had plenty of opportunities to scrawl artistic lines in the snow.
WHITE ON CUE
Calling the Alps my home for years has meant watching as the golden leaves
