Le Petit Arc, Aiguebelle

This is a very large day out, but if you're properly fed and it's not too hot, it's great! Here's a little taster of the descent after the Pas de Chèvres. The first 1000m or so of climbing is a very pleasant road/forest road ascent. The temperature was perfect and we got peeks of some great views, tempting us as to what was to come.From around 1200m the relatively gentle ascent became much steeper, with around 500m to gain on forest roads which were just a bit too steep to pedal up. To be honest, my bum enjoyed the respite after a couple of hours sat on my very firm saddle!Once we reached 1750m, it was time to shoulder the bikes, although using the PeakRider devices to keep the bikes on our backs meant we could go hands free, and I chose to take my walking poles to help take some of the strain off my knees.From this point we'd hit the snow-line and the hoar frost on the trees was just amazing with that great juxtaposition of green and white. As we continued to climb, the landscape became whiter and whiter, and the wind ever colder.Just below the summit there was an option to traverse across, and given the biting wind (my Suunto was now reading -2!) and the fog-enveloped summit we decided to take it rather than continue up the shoulder in the wind. This proved to be a great decision as we got out of the wind quickly and made swift progress across to the ridgeline that we'd planned to descend anyway.We took a bit of a detour once there, as the narrow path down our planned route (directly down the ridgeline) looked a little questionable under the snow, but the trail we did ride was great. There was only 1-2cm of snow on the ground and the grip was good.There are some excellent technical sections of trail up there, if you enjoy a technical challenge you would love them. There were some parts we had to walk, and once we'd recrossed the stream, we had to hike-a-bike back across and up (not far) to the Pas de Chevres.From there, there's still 1300m of descent yet to come, and the very best part is down the shoulder directly below the Char de la Turche - we rejoined this at around 1400m having descended past the two parking areas indicated on the signposts and on the IGN 1:25,000 map. Down at the Trou du Loup we found a chapel where there was a picnic bench and a water tap. Our traversing trail from there turned out to be excellent too, and even after the village of Montfort it wasn't bad, although less technical interest at this point. Finally we reached the tarmac and rolled down to where we'd left the van about 8 hours earlier!