Mountain Biking in Serre Chevalier

The Riding in Serre Chevalier

Beginner

Start at Villeneuve, off the Casse du Bœuf chairlift, where most of the park’s gentle riding lives. The headline first run is Marmotte, a new green DH that drops around 1km from the Serre Chevalier summit area down to the Soup’Line trail — smooth, rolling and built to teach you to carry speed without anything biting. From there, La Soup’Line is the green to lap until cornering and braking feel automatic. Villeneuve also has the MTB Découverte zone, a dedicated learning area of small banked turns and progression features for getting children and first-timers rolling before they commit to a lift-served descent.

Skip the Chantemerle summit cable car on day one. The high ground there hands you a lot of vertical fast, and that vertical is exactly what a new rider doesn’t want underneath them. Book a morning with a local school, lap Marmotte and Soup’Line off the Villeneuve chair until the green flows, then step up to one of the blues on the same lift. The dry, grippy southern-Alps dirt is forgiving here, which makes Serre Chevalier a genuinely good place to learn.

Intermediate

This is the sweet spot for the park, because six of the eleven marked trails are blue. Ricelle is the blue to build on off the Chantemerle side, an open, flowing descent that lets you trust the bike at speed without black-grade consequences. Orée du Bois and Mélèzine add woodland blues with more shape and a few rollers, the runs where you stop braking into every corner. Lap these off the gondola and chairlift combinations until they feel quick, then start linking them into longer top-to-bottom days.

When you want distance over laps, the wider valley is where Serre Chevalier pulls ahead of a normal park. The Grand Serre Che is the resort’s emblematic enduro itinerary — a long, mixed descent that strings high-alpine singletrack into forest and feels like a proper day out rather than a lift lap. The Balcons de Serre Chevalier traverse gives you sustained high-level riding into a technical singletrack descent. Intermediates get the best of the place once they’re comfortable on reds, because that grade unlocks the long enduro lines without the commitment of the steep stuff.

Advanced

The Chantemerle summit is the prize. Ride the Ratier gondola, take the cable car to 2,500m, and the mountain falls away through alpage and forest with the resort’s biggest descents under your wheels. Alpage and Les Ecoutes are the park reds that bridge into the serious terrain: faster, rockier, jumpier, the trails where the dry southern dirt lets you push harder than you’d dare up north. The single park black, Tabaz’Co, is the steep, technical line that punishes hesitation — earn it by sessioning the reds first.

The real advanced riding, though, is the enduro network. Le Monêtier-les-Bains is the engine room: the rebuilt MONET’ENDURO zone packs five enduro-specific tracks into one sector, roughly 52km of trail and around 5,420m of vertical drop, served off the Bachas chairlift. Up-valley classics like Endur’Hope, Intense and Trip Chaude are long, raw, off-piste-feeling descents that reward fitness as much as nerve. Big pedal-and-shuttle objectives — the Granon traverse to Croix de Toulouse, the Fréjus to Crête de la Balme ridge — turn a riding day into a mountain day. Treat all of these as ride-them-when-you’re-ready lines, and go when the high mountain is clear rather than in cloud.

eMTB

Serre Chevalier is made for e-bikes, because the geography rewards self-shuttling more than queuing. The valley spreads its riding across four sectors and 15km of road, and the best enduro trails out of Le Monêtier and over the high cols are real efforts on a pedal bike. On an e-MTB you climb out to the quiet enduro singletrack that lift riders never reach, link the Granon and Fréjus high ground under your own power, and turn a network this spread out into a comfortable day rather than an epic. The 55-odd marked MTB itineraries and the long traverses across the valley are exactly the terrain an e-bike unlocks. Village hire shops stock current e-MTBs alongside their downhill and enduro fleets, so you don’t need to bring your own — and the dry, sunny climbs make summer pedalling here a pleasure rather than a slog.