June 21st: Aosta to Grand St Bernard Hospice

 In the morning, there was more clarity. The pass was set to open on June 22^nd at 12:00pm. However, today was a Sunday! I was more than certain that the road was ready, and that the barrier if any, was solely because somebody had to sign off on the work and that person didn’t work on weekends. I have a lot of confidence in the Italian/European work ethic. At breakfast, Arturo said that a mutual friend of ours, Louis Perrochon, was very negative about the idea. “What’s the difference between tomorrow and today? No cars today!” I declared. We were going to ride, but Xiaoqin and Bowen would probably go hiking and then we’d text them when we got lodging at the Grand StBernard hospice, which was confirmed to be open and taking reservations. While I’d ridden the pass a couple of times before, I’d never stayed at the hospice, nor had I even visited the St Bernard museum, and given the heat expected in the Sion valley I was not in a hurry to experience it.

After an excellent breakfast, we rolled the bikes out of the garage and started riding out towards the mountain. The Garmin route I’d laid out took us on the Eastern edge of the ridgeline, which was ideal for staying shaded on the climb. Not for the last time on this trip was I grateful for the new improved popularity heatmaps routing.

The nice thing about the steep first sections was that we gained altitude rapidly, so the effort was paying off in cooling temperatures. As we climbed we ran into a local cyclist. I checked with if the pass was open and he said it was. Arturo followed up and got a bunch of directions that later turned out to make no sense. It could very well be that our route did extra climbing in order to stay in the shade longer, so he was trying to route us to somewhere with less climbing, but we were already pretty happy with the route!

After about 2 hours of climbing, the road finally descended and dumped us out into the intersection with the state highway. There was a water fountain at the intersection, so we stopped to refill our water bottles. Boen spotted a couple with what looked like a very chill and mellow dog, which turned out to be a St Bernard! He spent a few minutes happily petting the dog.

At this point, we started seeing other cyclists coming up the main road. One of them stopped at the water fountain and we asked her if the Grand St Bernard road was open to cyclists, and she replied in the affirmative, no hedging. “That was a lot more helpful than the last guy we talked to.” Replied Arturo.

The main road was busy and had lots of cars. We were thus very happy when we turned off it just 20 minutes later onto the pass highway as the rest of the motor traffic went through the toll tunnel (which was open, but as always, denied for cyclists).  The traffic didn’t drop to zero, however, since the road was opened to the barrier and was still an attractive destination for hiking. Nevertheless, it was no longer a hellish continuous stream of fast moving traffic, and being at above 1800m, it was as lot cooler!

Xiaoqin and Bowen had parked at one of the parking spots and got some nice pictures of us as we climbed. As we got further up, the views improved and the traffic diminished until we came along row after row of parked cars just before the barrier, which was basically a pole across the road surrounded by plastic lane protectors. There were signs saying “Road Interrupted”, and that pedestrians and cyclists were not to use the road, but this being Italy, nobody actually respected the sign when it was easy to roll your bike under the pole! Hikers and cyclists clearly were on the road.

After taking a few pictures, Arturo, Boen, and I crossed under the barriers and began riding. This final segment was above the treeline so we were in full sun, but it was also so high that it got the pass breeze and the cooling.  We rode in perfect silence, interrupted only occasionally by the sound of an e-bike motor working furiously.

The galleries, which were normally noisy, echoing with the sound of noisy cars and motorcycles, were a place of solace from the sun. I even felt relaxed enough to take a video from inside one of the galleries.

We stopped a couple of times, once to refill our water bottles and once to eat. This was by far the biggest single climb on the trip—even though Cime de la Bonnette was taller, Aosta was much lower in elevation than Jausiers, so the climb ended up being longer. When we crested the last rise and saw the barrier, we celebrated and saw the summit lake. Mark had ridden all the way to the hospice but we called him back so we could have lunch at the lake. The lake restaurant was very busy, but the lake itself had several picnic benches, and the waitress told us that we could take our trays out to the picnic benches if we didn’t want to wait for a table, so that’s what we did.

The food was satisfying, and the view magnificent. We ate our lunch relatively quickly and then noticed there was a hotel on the Italianside. “The Italian side is usually cheaper than the Swiss side,” remarked Arturo,” Maybe we should get a quote from them!” Mark pointed out that there was another barrier between this Italian hotel and where the car parking lot was, but it wasn’t too far a walk for the roller baggage.

When we got a quote from the hotel, however, it wasn’t cheaper than the hospice internet pricing, so we demurred, pushed our bikes around the Swiss border barrier, and went to the Swiss hospice. It turned out they had 2 different types of rooms, and once we saw both, we picked the modern rooms which had internet, and similar pricing. Xiaoqin and Bowen drove over, but since the rooms weren’t ready yet, we had time to visit the St Bernard museum. Xiaoqin would grab a quick snack, get out her bike, and ride both sides of the pass, exploring both the closed side and the side she had driven up from the tunnel.

The St Bernard museum had actual live St Bernard dogs we could meet with, take photos of, as well as displays of the history of the dogs. Sad to say, they are no longer used as rescue dogs for which they were originally bred and trained for, because the new style of alpine rescue depends heavily on helicopters and St Bernards are simply too big to fit in helicopters!

After the museum visit, the rooms were ready. When we were all showered and rested, Arturo and I walked back to the Italian side past the barriers and shot more pictures. It’s hard to overstate how accomplished we felt—we had accomplished everything I had planned to do as part of the tour, despite unexpected road closures, train line outages, and had just gotten to ride one of the tallest passes of the trip unencumbered by motorized traffic.

Dinner was decent, if unimaginative because we simply took the half pension option and all ordered pretty much the same thing. The after dinner walk consisted of walking back to the pass along the hiking trail rather than the road, and enjoying the peace we found there, as well as discovering all the hiking trails that were available. Xiaoqin and Bowen would get to hike those trails tomorrow while the cyclists braved the heat to make it to Brig.