July 4th: Lauterbrunnen to Col des Mosses

By the time we’d eaten breakfast, finished drying all the laundry that needed drying, and loaded up the car, it was 8:30. We rolled down the main road, eschewing the bike path completely. By the time we got into the outskirts of Wildersil, there was a bike lane. After that, we climbed along an overpass and then a back road took us to the shores of Thunersee.

From outside Darlingen to Faulensee, the bike path stays more or less next to the lake, granting us pretty views. We didn’t stop for long anywhere, because we knew we had a very long day to ride, and while we had already done 30km, the climbing for the day was back loaded.

Near Spiez, we suddenly started seeing big groups of hikers, all looking very serious (hiking sticks, running vests). We would later figure out that this was Vom See zum Berg, a hiking event that took you from Spiez to the top of Schynige Platte. It sounded like a lot of walking but the amount of support you got was substantial as well.

In Spiez, we started climbing along the bike path, which took us towards the Simmental. At first, the bike path maintained a reasonable separation from the main road, but in Erlenbach, it intersected the main road and hit what looked like a bottleneck. We had to squeeze into car traffic that was practically at a standstill, and were relieved when the bike route signs steered us almost immediately off onto a side road that had signs telling automobiles that they were forbidden.

The day had warmed up rapidly, but for a good half hour we were mostly in shade which protected us from the worst of it. After Boltigen, however, the bike path really separated from the highway and began to turn into single track in places, meandering amongst farm roads and other gravel pavement. I should have taken this as a sign to look for an alternate route, but the bottleneck earlier had convinced me that traffic on any sort of main road would have been a nightmare.

Despite it being a Saturday, the farmers were out in force working hard, making lots of hay bales. Luckily none of our allergies tripped up. In any case, the heat and the random undulations of the road were our biggest challenges. We stopped in Zweisimmen for lunch at a Migros. We had gotten separated from Mark but he was at a store next to the train station. We saw lots of traffic going in the other direction but not that much traffic heading up the road. At this point I should have just decided to ride up the main road, but after joining Mark we followed the signed bike route instead.

This was fine all the way up till Oeschseite, but after that the old road did some pretty insane stuff resulting in a 20+% grade which forced Boen and I to get off and walk! This burnt all of our matches. By the time we got to Saanenmoser we were pretty beat. There wasn’t even a pass marker!

From Saanenmoser it was a gentle descent into Gstaad where we found the bike path but started riding on the road instead because the traffic seemed more preferable than the bike route we had just ridden. In Chateau d’Oex, we stopped at the Coop to buy ice cream but Mark had chosen to keep going. It was very warm and I was dreading the idea of climbing to Col des Mosses, even though it was only a 534m climb. We ate the rest of our cycling food and convinced ourselves to keep going because it was the last climb of the entire tour, or so we thought!

The start of the climb was as horrible as I thought it was going to be. It wasn’t a difficult grade, but it was completely exposed, and what traffic there was felt pretty unpleasant. Past the intersection where the turn off for Les Moulins was, however, the traffic quickly diminished and to my surprise we started getting shade! We were still pretty tired but the grade was gentle enough that we could keep pedaling, and we were not tempted by any bike path signs to do anything but stay on the main road.

After La Lecherette, the road took a quick dip and we could almost convince ourselves that we were at the summit, except that we knew that the hotel was right at the summit proper. Col des Mosses unfortunately wasn’t high enough for us to get a strong summit breeze, but we did get relief from the oppressive heat we had faced getting out of Chateau d’Oex.

At the summit sign, there was no sign of Mark so we took our summit photo without him. It would turn out that he thought there wasn’t one, and he would get his summit photo during the after dinner walk. We got to the hotel and there was Mark, who’d just finished some food. We parked our bikes and went and checked in. They first gave us directions for us to tell Xiaoqin not to park across the street since there would be a morning market there tomorrow. They then showed us to the bike locker, where a bunch of Swiss cyclists had also showed up! They were locals, having ridden from Lausuanne, and enthusiastically told us that we were on the wrong pass and should be headed to the Swiss side of Lake Geneva until I told them that the lodging was expensive and had no AC. Since they were locals, they had no need of lodging on the Swiss side of Lake Geneva and weren’t even aware of the pricing and AC differences!

We were given our room keys and we managed to get started stretching and so forth before noticing that the bathroom door didn’t close! Talking to the hotel management got them to come up and fix that before Xiaoqin and Bowen showed up. We moved in, got dressed and showered and then had dinner a la carte at the hotel restaurant before going for an after dinner walk.

Mark pointed out to me that since tomorrow was a short day, we could do another pass before riding down to Lake Geneva! His plan would have us ride to Les Diablerets and then climb Col de la Croix before dropping into Villars Sur-Ollon and descending into Aigle. It was additional climbing but not too much and would ensure we wouldn’t get to Thonon les Bains too early. Mark was feeling so good that he was going to climb to Col du Pillon as well as an out and back.

To my surprise, Boen agreed to do this, so we loaded the route onto our GPS units before going to bed.