Waking up to a generous breakfast, we loaded up the car only to discover that the tandem had a rear flat tire. An inspection of the tire carcass on both inside and outside, I found no foreign matter, and so replaced the inner tube, which turned out to have a leaking patch. I replaced that with a brand new TPU tube, which held this time. This used up all the battery on my electric pump, but there’s a reason I carry a battery bank, and it’s not for my almost 3 year old Pixel 8 Pro. I plugged the pump in and left it charging while we rode towards the bottom of our first pass, the Col de la Columbiere.
Once again, my memory lied to me. I remembered Col de la Columbiere as being an easy col because Mike Samuel and I had ridden up to it from Cluses on the road. However, from Bonneville, my new route had taken several short cuts which meant that we faced grades of 10-12% before joining up with the proper highway where it flattened out in the town of Les Respondir.
From there, the climb was manageable and quite pleasant, until near the summit where the grades went up again but we were finished well before noon. Xiaoqin and Bowen were doing a hike there—we spotted the car parked at the summit, but it was too early for lunch, so we descended the col. Every time I visit the alps I’m always surprised by how pretty it is. In the intervening years I’d forgotten how pretty Col de la Columbiere was on the descent, and when the road turned up again the hunger hit both me and Boen. We recruited Arturo to have lunch with us, but the others were well ahead and headed up the Col des Arravis already.
After lunch, we climbed to the summit of Col des Arravis, where short walks could take you the magnificent views of Mont Blanc. We had drinks or an ice cream, and then proceeded to descend to Flumet, where we had a hotel reserved for the night. Stephan had put together a size L Ritchey Montebello to the same specifications as Xiaoqin’s, with the exception that I told him to get ultralight Superteam Carbon wheels instead of the Ritchey wheelset, reasoning that if you’re paying the weight penalty for disc brakes you should try to get some of it back from carbon wheels that were relatively affordable. As I predicted, the Ritchey Montebello descended amazingly well, with its low bottom bracket and made-for-randoneuring frame geometry. Stephan was an aggressive descender on the tandem, and that comfort with speed translated directly to the Ritchey Montebello. While the tandem would still out-run him on any straight-line, if the descent had a lot of switch backs, he would catch and pass us on the corners, where the tandem had to brake earlier and slow to almost a stand-still on the corners before picking up speed again on the downslope. The tandem reached high speeds quickly on any kind of grade for us to even consider pedaling on descents.
At one point we stopped and lifted Stephan, Arturo's and Mark's bike, and to our surprise, the steel Ritchey Montebello was lighter than both Arturo and Mark's titanium bikes. Arturo's bike had a steel fork, so it wasn't much of a surprise, but Mark's bike had a carbon fork as well!
In Flumet, we stopped at the only hotel in town that was listed on booking.com. The owner was very friendly, and showed us to the dedicated bike room, and also recommended one of only two restaurants that were open this early in the season, the others all being closed. “Breakfast is at 7am”, he said confidently.
It being a Sunday, nothing was opened except the campground near the bottom of town. But Xiaoqin was so hungry by the time she showed up that she walked to it for ice cream. At dinner, we had what was essentially bar food.
After dinner, we walked around the town. I identified the fountain where Mike and I had taken a nap in 2005 prior to continuing with Col de Sassies—it had been taken over by another restaurant, which was why I didn’t immediately recognize it when I first saw it. We also found the old mill, which otherwise looked like an abandoned house by the river that was serviced by a cable platform.
We went to bed early. The next day was Monday and the forecast called for rain in the afternoon, but I thought that there was good reason for it to hold. The weather after that looked iffy, dashing my hopes for a climb up the Col D’ Iseran to see walls of ice 10’ tall. We didn't have to make any commitments, since the next day was a Monday and there would be plenty of lodging no matter where we ended up.
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