O ctober usually brings some beautifully colorful days with pleasant temperatures on the trails at the end of the bike season. We’ve always loved making our videos in these conditions over the past few years. After three successful „AMT“ - (All Mountain Trial) video projects, we were fully aware of the Nicolai fans waiting for a worthy addition and we must not let them down. In the 2012 season I’ve been riding the „Argon FR“ with Gates Carbon Drive a lot. I quickly realized that the combination of hardtail frame and the GATES Carbondrive has huge potential to go big on all-mountain tours.

 After a while searching for new locations we figured out that the Zittau Mountains might be a good choice, offereing great diversity. A combination of huge sandstone cliffs and a dense trail network in the forest provided the perfect conditions for technically tricky All Mountain Trial Action.

To avoid unpleasant surprises by poor weather conditions, we decided to plan our trip less than a week in advance. For our targeted shooting days we saw very cold weather with temperatures around freezing point rolling in. But at least no significant rainfall. What we hadn‘t considered was the precipitation that had come down on the Zittau mountains a few days earlier. Accompanied by a polar air mass, the rain had turned to snow and hadn‘t melted. Nevertheless we set and soon found ourselves in 15 - 20cm deep snow at minus two degrees surrounded in dense fog. Our tour guide and the MTB Locals advised us to cancel our project but we had no other choice but to see it through.

For me personally, the situation was not entirely unknown, as I used to spend hours on snow and ice during my preparations for the World Cup trial season. With a lot of motivation and an avalanche shovel in my backpack we went on the trails. But before going to the big jumps, it was shoveling time! The initial paths and rocky trails showed that the technically tricky passages had some kind of grip despite the snow. Thus good riding action on the rocks seemed possible. At the starting point on the mountain, we discovered a 3 meter wide rock gap. This seemed to be somewhat doable in spite of the extremely short and narrow run in. Take off and landing zone were slightly covered with snow, but I managed to jump over this gap. This entry into the trail was the action of the day and now everything seemed possible. We continued the tour, meter by meter, we shoveled our lines and cleared them all by bike. We noticed that snow is a strange medium ‚under tyre‘. It’s of course primarily slippery, but in some situations snow can provide grip and particularly mitigates hard landings from big heights. Balancing on the fallen tree was a kind of a lottery game. You never knew at what point grip was available and where the bark turned to a soapy slippery surface. Our two-day tour was marked by many climbs to explore and numerous shovelling sessions to make the trail visible and ridable. But in the end we were able to bring together a successful cohesive tour filled with stacks of technically tricky lines and sections.

 After two days of shooting and fairly wet shoes, we have also learned a lesson:

Snow in the woods is brighter than expected.
If you drop in the snow you land deeper than you think. And white balance has nothing to do with mountainbiking in snow. cheers, Marco watch!