This is Italy’s Backcountry

A friend in rememberance. A friend out of place. A start. A finish. Some bikes.

These were the basic ingredients of the journey. The details would come later. Probably.

The crew at Backcountry Finale – a mountain bike shuttle service operation based in Finale Ligure, about an hour west of Genoa, on Italy’s northwestern coast – had the bones of a plan in place: ride from their home base to Livigno, about 500km north, and do it all on mountain bikes.

Cannondale couldn’t resist being part of the experience. This quest was going to genuinely live up to the term “epic”: crossing valleys, crossing rivers, crossing multiple alpine passes, traversing ancient trails around abandoned mountain villages whose only remaining residents were dust and deer. They would spend endless hours on their machines in the middle of nowhere, and a colossally capable eMTB was necessary. We offered up a small swarm of Moterra Neo LTs.

The group of five set off in memory of a friend who’d left the world and their joy of riding behind. In his place, unwittingly, joined a rogue of sorts: a young geographer, a friend of the crew with very little mountain biking experience but an appetite for the unknown. He’d spent much of his career observing the reforestation of rural Italy in the absence of populations that had migrated away over the last half century. His perspective would bring a tint of history's lens to an otherwise wholly new experience for everyone involved.

When the bikes started rolling, so did the cameras. See it all here.

"The point of it all is to travel, to sleep outdoors, to ride downhill lines, to hang out with people, to eat like crazy in the evening to regain strength, to remember the friends with whom we shared this way of living and who keep inspiring us in everything we do and want to be.”

The Backcountry Finale Team