It sounded so reasonable on paper. The descent from Corne de Sorebois down to the emerald-green Lac de Moiry is a scenic dream, but it’s also a classic bottleneck. Hordes of hikers, a single trail, and now a mountain railway shuttling mountain bikers up the mountain. When our much-vaunted magic word of “coexistence” reaches its limits like this, a separate route makes perfect sense. That’s why a new mountain bike trail is currently being built there. So far, so good.

This summer, the excavators rolled in—and now the scale of this project is becoming alarmingly clear. This wasn’t a matter of sensitively carving a path into the alpine topography. No, a trail on the scale of a bike park has been carved into the hillside. What we’re seeing here is a smooth, streamlined “flow highway” with massive banked turns and jumps, right in the middle of a sensitive, high-alpine landscape. It is quite simply a disgrace when it comes to mountain bike trails—one that, fortunately, is rarely seen with such brutality.

Nature is being desecrated for the sake of mountain bikers’ fun. The Sorebois Trail is a shot in the foot for our sport.

The real tragedy of this project: Such oversized excavator tracks play right into the hands of our sport’s critics. If I were a conservation activist—seeing this, the case would be crystal clear: nature is being desecrated for the sake of mountain bikers’ enjoyment. I’d have to agree with him. Against this backdrop, the new trail at Sorebois is not a win, but a shot in the foot for our sport. It’s the excavator-shovel-dug confirmation for all those who see us not as nature-loving athletes anyway, but as reckless Alpine hooligans.

But it’s not just the environmentalists who are justifiably tearing their hair out at this sight. Even I, as a mountain biker, stand there shaking my head. When trails for my beloved sport are dug into the terrain so recklessly, I have no choice but to take a stand. The great advantage of mountain biking has always been—and still is—its compatibility with nature. But if we now start digging up entire slopes using the mindset of winter sports, then we’ve lost. The Sorebois Trail is a shocking example of how we’re blindly maneuvering sustainable mountain biking into a dead end.

My outrage over the excessive trail dimensions at Sorebois has nothing to do with my fundamental skepticism toward flow trails. Rather, my nature-loving heart aches at this sight. This isn’t about me and my preferred riding style, but about protecting mountain biking’s most important asset: nature.

Incidentally, the cynical twist to this project is provided by the name of the trail-building company responsible. “Wild Trails” is the name of this young, inexperienced, and locally based group. The only thing “wild” about this artificial trail is the destruction it causes. In any case, the company hasn’t given mountain biking a new trail—it’s left us with a rotten egg.