What to say about today. They say a picture tells a thousand words. Over dinner tonight we compared pictures from our camera phones. Not a lot needed to be said and we were too tired to talk much. The hyperbole could be summarised in one word anyway. Amazing.

The day began with a quick shop at the supermarket to pick up food for the day, followed by picking up our bikes from the bike shop and loading them into the van to be transported to Soldeu Bike Park. The weather was stunning with clear, cloudless skies and temperatures in the mid twenties.

Our group this year consisted of Martin our guide as it was in Chamonix 2 years ago, plus his two assistants Will and Dave, as well as Martin's girlfriend Lenka plus Mike and Matt from Wales and Hugo, a young guy from northern England.

Soldeu is a ski resort during the winter months and the village sits at 1,710 metres above sea level whilst the top of the ski area is at 2,580 metres above sea level. In 2012 it hosted an alpine World Cup.

When you ride bikes at that level, the scenery is bound to be spectacular and the terrain much steeper and rockier than where we generally ride bikes.

Martin has an outstanding knowledge of the areas he runs his tours through, and his ability to find and navigate to remote trails that only the very local of locals would know about is what makes these rides special. Today we rode a mixture of man-made trails which flowed down many of the ski fields, all the way to the village of Soldeu and the chair lift station, and then later after lunch at the village, we rode some more natural stuff which took us well off the beaten track. The feature of the day was riding Jordy's Way, a predominantly natural track which we got to by chairlift followed by a fairly strenuous climb of about 1km to approximately 2,200 metres above sea level.

It was certainly a challenging decent, with a few craggy rocks to be negotiated and a couple of small sections where all of the group bar Mitchell had to dismount. There is no doubt that his hours and hours of practice of trackstands, wheelies, manuals and endos have given him the unique skill set that allows him to deal with most of the obstacles and terrain that we were faced with today and indeed on most mtb trails. People without those skills (me included) can make do to a point but when it gets particularly challenging, getting off and walking is the safest option.

We finally reached the bottom in the town of Encamp around 6pm. We were a bit delayed by a couple of flats to Hugo and a split tyre for Wendy that needed some emergency repairs.

Eventually the bikes were loaded into the van and we made our way back to La Massana, content in the day's accomplishments, but physically wrecked.