The top part has an optional red rated section called "canyon", and this takes you over some snow sections. Haha now that was amusing! My first attempt to ride on snow, albeit slightly soft snow ended in 2 spills as the front wheel snaked all over the place and dumped me off. At least it was a soft landing, I was laughing my head off!
The initial descent from the gondola goes down quickly, but there are a couple of sneaky climbs (32m in total), climbing at 3000m or so with full face helmet and low seat sure takes it out of you.
Half way down you pick up some other trails, including a road section that is strewn with golfball sized rocks - hold on tight and keep the bike pointed in the right direction. I hit 36.1mph there, and finished the whole descent in just short of 30minutes, giving an average speed of 17.6mph for the 8.77m miles and 1461m vertical descent. Not too shabby.
So that was pretty much the Mountain of Hell route, apart from that starts half way up the ski slope on the glacier, and adds a red section to the end of 2miles with an additional 827m of descending (down to a village called Venosc) just for extra pain.
Heres the graph from the GPS software (altitude in feet because it won't let you mix metric and imperial measurements - should be height in metres and speed in mph hey ho)
You can also see the action at motionbased here http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/player/3291572
By the end, my hands were completely numb, I had taken some Ibuprofen before hand to keep the hand pain at bay, so pain wasn't an issue, but numbness was :)
Lunch now then back out, perhaps to try that leg down to Venosc.
BTW forks not leaking anymore since yesterdays fettling :)
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