Day 8, Monday the 21st of June and it was cold this morning with fresh snow from yesterday still visible from the lodge. So we elected to do a series of climbs in, on and around Alpe d'Huez, the thought being we would stay reasonably low and close to the King of the Mountain Lodge, while we got in some fantastic cycling on some of the shelf roads that link up with the famous 21 switch back route that goes directly up from Bourg d'Oisans up to the ski resort on top of Alpe d'Huez. At right is a view of Bourg d'Oisans from the shelf road that approaches Alpe d'Huez from the north west. It is quite a steep drop off and the one lane road leads to interesting passing situations when two cars meet going in opposite directions. Cars honk as they go around blind corners. Hank and I had already ridden this route on day 3, but we liked the climb so much we decided to do it again. The road is much quieter than the main route up Alpe d'Huez. Below I attach the map my Garmin GPS generated of today's festivities.
We started our ride from the bottom left of the Garmin map with a descent from our lodge on the Col d'Ornan and drop the 8 kilometers down to the valley highway. There we took a left hand turn and headed north up the valley where we took a right hand turn and started up what is the beginning of the climb to the col de la Croix de Fer. The hard right we make at the the top of the map is the beginning of the switch bacyks up to Villard Reculas. Even though we avoided
the switch backs on the main Alpe d'Huez route we still had to gain all that elevation to get that high up on the mountain. The stunning views from the shelf road make it worth the climb. In the picture left you can see the bottom of the road up the Col d'Ornan just left of my left elbow. It's hard to believe Hank and I came down that road earlier the same morning. It's the same road we would go back up at the end of our day.
Where our route runs into the great squiggly mess of GPS points on the Garmin map is where Hank and I hit the main route up Alpe d'Huez. The picture below left is of Hank on the shelf road with some of the middle switch backs on the main Alpe d'Huez route below him.
We saw three other riders on the shelf road, one ascending and two descending. There were dozens of cyclist going up and down the main Alpe d'Huez route. We took a hard left onto the main road and headed up to the top, through the town of Huez and finally to the ski resort on the summit. Then we dropped all the way down into Bourg d'Oisans going through all 21 switchbacks to meet Ki for lunch - a well earned pizza for each of us.
After lunch we said good bye to Ki and started back up Alpe d'Huez on the main route. We rode up the first six switchbacks to the tiny village of La Grade where we took a right off of the main Alpe d'Huez route and headed south east on another climbing shelf road, somewhat lower down on the mountainside than the first shelf road. The second bump on the elevation chart from my Garmin GPS shown here shows the altitude gain on our second climb of the day.
We again had beautiful views of the Bourg d'Oisans valley 2,000 some feet below us from a narrow one lane road perched on the side of the mountain.
Hank tried to kill me on this road.
He told me to spin back down it a little ways and come back up so he could take my picture. As I started down I heard a rattling sound above me and then a piece of shale the size of a college textbook crashed on to the road. I expected that this might be the start of a stony deluge, a rock slide of Las Vegas slot machine jackpot pay out like proportions, but that was it. Nice try, Hank, but no cigar. The resulting photo is here to the right. In the photo you can see Bourg d'Oisans in the valley below. We took the shelf road a considerable distance to the south where it finally came to a summit and started to drop back down into the main valley. It was mostly downhill all the way back to Bourg d'Oisans. From there we made the climb back up the Col d'Ornan to our lodge. The total climbing for our day was 8,239 feet in 56 miles of riding. It was another great day of riding for Team Clydesdale.
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