Off to the Alps – Our Plans for Late Summer 2026

What’s the plan for this trip?

Our plan while we are homeless is to head to the Alps. It’s not a particularly novel plan from us, we love the mountains, but this year we want to check out some of the downhill mountain bike parks, some of which are in ski resorts we visit in the winter.

Why bike parks? Downhill biking is really more Paul’s thing. Of the two of us he’s the adrenaline seeker with a penchant for speed. I’m happy to bimble along behind him but prefer my mountain biking a bit tamer. Cross Country (XC) rather than downhill. We’ll be doing some of that too, as well as walks and hikes and a few via ferratas. Depending on how things go I might be heading off for a run while Paul gets his thrills in the bike park.

Timing

We’d been planning our trip for a few weeks while we waited for our flat to sell. While researching we found that a lot of these alpine bike parks close in late August and early September. These closing dates seem fair enough in high altitude resorts where the snow may be arriving in September, but it seems to be quite a short season for some resorts where winter conditions wouldn’t be expected until October. With our flat sale not going through until mid August that gave us a limited opportunity to explore the bike parks of France and Italy (with some exceptions) but we did find that Austrian resorts stay open for longer although they come with a much higher price tag. That’s probably the balance that resorts have to find. Do they stay open longer and charge higher prices to keep the infrastructure open for smaller numbers of bikers, or do they keep the costs down and go for high volumes of visitors in peak season before shutting down the resorts for the autumn.

That bit of research gave us the rough shape of our plan. We would visit a couple of places in France, then head across to the Aosta valley in Italy, wander into Livigno, dive over to the Dolomites and finally go north into Austria before heading home. Of course things can change but it gave us something to aim for and we started to populate our planning map.

We use Google My Maps to pin interesting places to visit for our trips.

Staying Safe

There were a couple of key things we needed to sort out if we were going to do this.

The first was insurance. Mountain biking, particularly downhill, is considered one of the more dangerous of the ‘extreme’ sports and insurance is difficult to find and expensive. We’ve never been covered for downhill before, which hasn’t been too concerning when most of our mountain biking has been pretty tame. But I didn’t want to find us with a hefty bill for rescue and recovery.

In the end I found insurance through SnowCard, they came recommended by quite a few people. We took out an annual policy which will also cover us for skiing and we extended the policy to cover trips of up to 90 days. That means we wont need to pay for additional insurance when it comes to our 2027 ski trip. It’s still a significant increase in costs, there didn’t seem to be a reduced price option for someone who will probably only do the easy runs very slowly.

The other thing to consider is protective gear. We have bike helmets (with MIPS) and gloves, but we don’t have full-face helmets or elbow, knee or back protection. For the first few bike parks we’d be visiting in France we wouldn’t strictly need full protection, but Italian and Austrian bike parks are more strict (probably with good reason) with their safety requirements. We spent a bit of time dithering over this, so we hadn’t sorted anything out by the time we left, but we decided that we would tackle the first couple of locations in France using our existing kit and then buy additional kit when we’d decided that we were definitely up for more downhill biking. After all it would be another big outlay so we didn’t want to pay for something we’d never use again.