Starting Our Mountain Biking Adventure in Les Saisies

25/08/2026

Les Saisies. Yes, we’ve been here before. In fact this will be our fifth visit. Maybe that makes us boring, but we’re likely to be back again so we obviously aren’t all that bothered about being judged.

All of our previous visits have been for skiing, so this visit in the summer was a little different. We were here for some downhill mountain biking.

We’d chosen Les Saisies as our first MTB destination for the same reason we like it for skiing – it’s not a super steep or rocky resort, rather it’s a lot more gentle and pastoral. It felt like it would be a nice introduction to downhill parks in the Alps and it had some good reviews to confirm our choice.

Staying in Les Saisies

As we drove to Les Saisies we wondered if we would get onto the aire. There are two Camping Car Parks (CCP) aires here now and only one of them opens in summer. A couple of years ago Col Saisies was a municpal aire with no EHU, as many spaces as you could squeeze in and a nice cheap price tag. Now it’s a CCP aire with better services and marked out pitches but a price to match.

As we were arriving on a Saturday in August we thought things might be busy. The upside of the CCP system is you can check how many spaces are available. You could even book, but I’m not willing to spend the annual fee to do that. I’d rather live with the very mild jeopardy of not knowing if we’ll get a space.

Actually there was no jeopardy at all as a) there were half a dozen spaces and b) the free car park on the opposite side of the road was being used as an unofficial aire.

So, we arrived, used the CCP app to generate our entry passcode and immediately went to get water and drop our waste. The space we had our eye on was taken by someone who arrived after us, but we did manage to get onto the back row away from the traffic noise. A quick walk down to Tourist Information to snag a trail map and a we were ready for Sunday on the mountain bikes.

Mountain Biking Les Saisies

We ended up spending two days on the trails in Les Saisies with a day in between to rest our aching bones.  We focussed on the green and blue downhill trails and they were great fun although Lovely Woods (a blue trail) was a bit of a challenge for me as it was the steepest blue.We took a look at the jump features on the red downhill trails and immediately knew they weren’t for us.

On the second day we spent the morning on the downhill trails again and tried out a route with a mix of blue and red enduro trails. We’ve been a bit mystified about what makes a trail Enduro, but here it seems to mean that the trail is very natural with rocks and roots and might have a little uphill mixed in with the downhill. Our favourite trail was probably the blue one from the top of the Bisanne lift which was quite long and varied.  

We were some of the only people on the trails who weren’t wearing full face helmets. I’ve always thought that these motorcycle style helmets were a bit over the top for low level mountain bikers like us, but here it was very normalised and left us feeling like the odd ones out. Luckily the only injury sustained while we were here was when I tried to brake with my buttocks. I stopped too suddenly, sat too far back on the back wheel and the pedal hit my shins as I put my foot on the floor (aka “Pedal Strike”). My shin looked very like the shin of a 10 year old child and not a 50 something woman and I don’t believe a full face helmet would have made any difference. Note to self to add knee and shin pads to the shopping list.

The mountain biking facilities here are excellent. The bike park is served by three lifts, all of which have trails which bring you back into the centre of the resort. Free bus services run around the local villages and most have bike racks, so you can devise downhill routes in the safe knowledge that you can get a lift back uphill. There are a variety of trails of all difficulties and the resort is very family friendly, as it is during the winter season. The lift pass was very good value at €25 for a day.

The views from the trails are lovely. At the top of the Chard de Beurre lift is a picnic area with awesome views of Mont Blanc. There are cows roaming across the hills with their bells clanging, an unusual obstacle on the green runs – although they are kept away from any of the steeper areas. Eagles abound here and we regularly saw them whirling over the slopes.

Cows taking no notice of mountain bikers hurtling past

Other Things to Do in Les Saisies

The weekend of our arrival was a local food event. There seems to be some sort of event on every weekend over summer. A few tasting stalls were dotted around the resort and I think there were also some more formal dining opportunities. We just happened to cycle past at one point and stopped to sample some small appetisers as well as several different ages of the firm yellow Beaufort cheese, which I think may have provided Paul with a new contender for ‘almost as good as Cheddar’. Les Saisies is in the Beaufortain region and there are at least two dairies we are aware of in town where you can queue up (and some big queues do form) to buy locally produced Beaufort cheese either in wedges or as bags of grated cheese ready to be made into a fondue.

There is plenty of walking in the area and we had a little leg stretch of a walk on the Monday after resting our bodies which were slightly achy from the unaccustomed downhill biking. Every part of our bodies seemed to have been jounced and jiggled. I never realised that bingo wings stretch all the way to one’s wrists but I could feel the (tiny amount of) loose skin on my forearms flapping as we bounced over the ruts on the trails.

On the drive through Megève on the way up to Les Saisies we’d seen some signs warning that the road would be closed on Tuesday due to the Tour de l’Avenir passing through. When I checked the map I saw that the Col des Saisies was one the high points roughly halfway through Stage 6 of this bike race. The cyclists would be pedalling right past the aire and the timing would be perfect too, passing at lunch time. We decided to take a pause during our day’s downhill to have some lunch and watch the tour go past. It wasn’t the Tour de France, but it was still a popular event with a caravan throwing out whistles and those inflatable tubes you can use to make very loud applause. We watched an elderly couple dart into the road to hoover up these meagre offerings and thrust them in their bags. It reminded me of my Grannanny who used to covet the cheap trinkets from Christmas crackers.

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After three days in Les Saisies it was time to move on, but we had been very impressed with our first summer visit.