Les 2 Alpes MTB Guide: Glacier-Top Bike Park, France

Europe's highest lift-served bike park drops 2,300 vertical metres from a working glacier to an alpine village. A breakdown of the trails, the Jandri sectors, the season window, and the train-first route in from Grenoble.

By the IMPT Travel desk · Published 2026-05-30

The Jandri Express gondola spits riders out at 3,200 metres, on a working glacier where summer ski lessons are still running on the snow above. From the deck, the first trail markers point downhill toward a village that sits 2,300 vertical metres below. Few European bike parks open from this altitude, and almost none stay rideable into late August on glacier-fed slopes. Les 2 Alpes is the outlier, and the trail map reflects it: 29 marked pistes, four lift sectors, and a vertical envelope that asks something different of riders than a typical Alpine resort.

The signature descent

The headline run is Venosc, a 3.5 km, 850-metre-descent flow line that drops from the mid-mountain down to the hamlet of Venosc in the gorge below. It rides as a long, sustained red, with a high-altitude top section that opens into pine forest as the elevation drops. Riders looking for a steeper, more technical proposition push instead onto Fury, one of the park's two Elite-graded trails, dropping 700 metres over 2.5 km off the Diable chair. Rocky Line (red, roughly 2 km / 360 m) links neatly with the Belle Etoile pitch for a mid-park lap that doesn't require glacier altitude.

For mileage rather than gradient, L'Ange is the longest sanctioned route in the park at around 7 km, graded green and accessed off the Diable high-speed chair. It is the trail most often used by intermediate riders building confidence before committing to the upper Jandri sectors.

How the bike park is structured

Four lift sectors define the riding: Jandri (the glacier-access gondola, top altitude 3,200 m), Diable, Venosc, and the gentler Vallée Blanche side. The trail count breaks down as roughly 3 green, 6 blue, 8 red, 3 black and 2 Elite, plus three signed enduro routes and a longer cross-country network. The Vallée Blanche flank carries most of the beginner and cross-country traffic; the Jandri-Diable axis carries the downhill program.

The shape crew maintains the bike park daily through the season, and the resort runs four bike-wash stations at the lift bases that use air rather than mains water, a small but pointed concession to drought summers in the Isère.

Season window

The lift-served season runs from mid-June through the end of August. Recent calendars have pushed an early-spring shoulder, with the Venosc sector opening in mid-April and weekend-only Jandri access through May, but the full park, including the glacier-top trails, only opens reliably from mid-June and closes around 30 August. Late-July and August offer the most consistent conditions; early June can be excellent on the lower trails but unreliable up high if the previous winter ran late.

The marquee event remains the Mountain of Hell, run in late June. Roughly 1,000 riders mass-start on the glacier snow and race a 25 km enduro line to the valley, with around 2,500 metres of descent. The 2025 edition was the 25th running. Race weekend is worth timing around either as spectacle or to avoid, depending on appetite for crowds.

Getting there without a car

Les 2 Alpes is unusually accessible by public transport for a high-altitude resort. Grenoble is the gateway: TGV from Paris Gare de Lyon takes roughly 3 hours, and from Grenoble the Transaltitude bus runs directly to the resort in about 1 hour 40 minutes. Lyon-Saint-Exupéry is the closest international airport, with shuttle connections taking around 2 hours 30 minutes. For European riders, the Paris-Grenoble-resort chain is one of the few Alpine bike-park itineraries that genuinely competes with flying, and it removes the rental-car logistics that bikes complicate.

Shoulder versus peak

Mid-July and late August are the sharper windows. They sit either side of the French school-holiday peak, deliver better lift queues, and tend to hold the upper trails in good condition. Late August in particular benefits from a drier trail surface after the early-summer melt has finished moving water through the park.

Where riders base themselves

The resort village sits at around 1,650 m and is compact enough to walk between lift base, repair shops and restaurants. Accommodation clusters into three pockets: village-centre apartments near the Jandri base for shortest commute to the gondola; quieter chalets toward the Diable side for mornings on the enduro trails; and the gorge village of Venosc itself, reachable by télécabine, for riders who want a slower evening pace. Independent bike shops on the main strip handle rentals, suspension service and shuttle bookings for off-piste enduro days into the surrounding Oisans massif.

Sustainability angle

Two factors make Les 2 Alpes a defensible choice for low-impact bike travel. The first is the train-and-shuttle access via Grenoble, which removes the most carbon-heavy leg of an Alps trip for most European riders. The second is the altitude itself: the glacier-fed upper trails extend the rideable season later into the summer than mid-altitude resorts further west, which means a trip can be timed for shoulder weeks rather than the saturated July-August peak.

A run-through of Piste du Jandri n°1, the blue trail dropping off the glacier-access gondola.