A single uphill pedal strike could be disastrous. Focused minds make sharp decisions.

“If you fall here, you don’t dead,” says Christian Ammann in his blunt, grammatically unique English.

Coming from a stoic, Swiss-German farmer turned mountain bike guide, this amounts to encouragement. More than a vertical mile of white-knuckle descending below, the slate roofs of Stalden, Switzerland glitter in the sun next to the Matter Vispa river, swollen and coffee-colored with glacial melt driven by a record-breaking heatwave cooking Europe.

A few minutes earlier, and a half-dozen tight switchbacks above, we had left 80-something mountain guide Elmar Brigger sitting on the patio of Restaurant Jägerstube, his cliffside retirement project. With some prompting, he had tooted out a solo on the alpenhorn—he was rusty—before pouring a round of home-distilled apricot schnapps. It was delicious and made for a dose of well-timed liquid courage.

But this was no time for daydreaming. The trail here is narrow but smooth, bench cut by generations of foot and hoof traffic, where threading improbably through bands of quartzite was the only way for early trailblazers to navigate the terrain. Neat, parallel lines are etched in the compact gravel. Someone has recently raked the trail and clipped the trailside alpine rose bushes and grasses. The fastidious Swiss attention to detail knows no bounds. One look at a local farmer’s meticulous firewood stack and it’s obvious that only an inherently genetic predisposition for organization could produce it. To a non-Swiss eye, it’s a bit like sculptured perfection when much less would have sufficed.

When you travel with your mountain bike from British Columbia, a place that has built a mountain biking culture and brand all its own, it’s hard not to carry with you a certain smugness—you have already experienced the pinnacle; anything else would be a pretender to the throne. As a born-and-bred B.C. boy, I was about to be humbled.