52 mbr MARCH 2018
FEATURE
y eyes are burning
with streaming sweat,
blood is thundering
through my ears
like a runaway train
and my legs are
smouldering with
lactic acid. The trail is
too steep and too loose
to climb, and every
few metres I have
to stop pushing my
bike and desperately
inhale all the thin air I
possibly can to keep my pulse from going into
overdrive. Richie Schley is 15 years my senior,
but he’s already at the top of the pass, one
foot in Switzerland, one in Austria, and
I’m starting to wonder if I can keep up for
another 25km.
We’ve come to Graubünden, Switzerland's
eastern most canton, for a high Alpine ride
worthy of a reunion. The last time our paths
had crossed was almost exactly 10 years ago.
I’d been on a photo shoot in Italy and Richie
taught me how to turn it on for Ale’s camera,something he’d been perfecting for years.
Since then I have been trying hard to ‘Schley’
my turns like the master himself.
If you’ve not been to the Graubünden
region, it’s the most eastern part of that
eastern canton, a little spur of Switzerland that
juts out like some craggy peak into Austria to
the north and Italy to the south.
It’s an unforgiving landscape this high,
unable to bear even a lonely tree, nor a
welcoming mountain hut. Not to mention a
single living soul... just one little ant, barely
visible through the sheeting drizzle. This ant
is Ale, below us on the mountainside, and I
would bet most of my life savings that he’s
swearing in Italian right now. Wow, does he
need an espresso. I could certainly do with
one. Richie, meanwhile, is already standing
triumphantly at the top, right on the border
between Austria and Switzerland, busy taking
care of his Instagram.
Scuol is still way off. The small town is our
base camp for the first two days of a three-day
trip, before we head further west to Davos
for a point-to-point trail ride to Filisur, where
we will be taking the train back home. Today