Day 18: Corvatsch Hike

The night before, I had looked over all the literature and discovered that there was one cable-car way that accepted the half price card, and that was the Corvatsch cable car way. Since it was a short bike ride away, we could even save money by biking to the ski station and biking back after the hike.

We started by taking the back way from St. Moritz Bad to try to avoid the main road, but soon found ourselves having to ride on the road around the Lej da Champfer. Fortunately, there was a bike path around it, and we took it and found ourselves having to climb about 130m up to the ski station. It was overcast but there were rays of sunlight coming through the clouds, so we hoped to avoid the fogby taking the cable car.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

At the cable car station, we bought the Wandern ticket, which allowed us to take the cable car up to the peak, ride it back down to the middle station, and then heck to a different cable car station and then bus back to the ski station where we had parked our bike. From the ski station, the views were pretty but the Corvatsch cable car was packed! For once we felt like normal tourists.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Our trip to the peak of Piz Corvatsch was not to be, however, as the cable car broke down at the middle station! It would probably be fixed later that day, but we were not willing to wait around to find out, as we had a hike to do. First up, a view of the local town and lake at Silvapana.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

The trail went down steeply from the middle station, so much so that we had to go very slowly. After a half hour or so, we finally manage to get to the climb, but were sad to discover that the weather was starting to turn sour.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

At a bench off the trail with a beautiful view, Phil said to me: "I don't know why, but I'm feeling like I've been out to lunch all day." Well, between that and the impending rain, we decided to cut our hike short and just do the Wasserweg (water way) trail that would take us through 5 lakes before the second ski station.

As we walked past lake after lake, the clouds got gloomier and gloomier until it finally started raining. Surprisingly, however, as we approached the end of the hike and were within view of the cable car, the rain stopped and the sun came out! While it was still cloudy and things didn't look all that great, we felt safe enough to have lunch on one of the benches while watching the fog.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We timed our descent to the cable car just right, with only a 20 minute wait until the bus arrived and took us back to the Corvatsch ski station. There, we were quickly refunded the unused portion of our cable car ticket, since the interruption was due to the station's technical difficulties.

We rode back to the youth hostel with an amazing tailwind, and got to our room just as it started pouring outside, so we were lucky Phil was having a bad day. We spent the rest of the day catching up on e-mail, doing laundry, and relaxing. Stinky guy was still there, but I figured I could put up with things for one more night and then we'd be on the road again.

"St. Moritz was nice," I said to Phil, "But it's not Rosenlaui. I don't think I'd come back here again. There's prettier places." "Yes," came the reply, "And it feels a lot more touristy."

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Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I was given this book by a Couchsurfer who stayed at my place last year. I set it aside, but found myself needing to take a break from Royal Assassin, which I'm on the verge of abandoning because it's characters are far too stupid, and of course what do I do, I picked up the book, which is about a nerd who can't get dates.

A few things you should know about this book. First, the nerd's from the Dominican Republic, where the men are suppose to be real men "with atomic level-G". Secondly, the novel's written by an MIT professor, MIT-textbook style. That means long multipage footnotes telling you about some interesting story behind the story behind the story. Third, the book was written in 2007, after pop culture, especially nerdy pop culture, has become hip. Hip enough that even with passages like these:

Sometime before dawn he dreamt about all the girlfriends he'd never had, row upon row upon row, like the extra bodies that the Miraclepeople had in Alan Moore's Miracleman...

or this:

Beli, who'd been waiting for something exactly like her body her whole life, was sent over the moon by what she now knew. By the undeniable concreteness of her desirability which was, in its own way, Power. Like the accidental discovery of the One Ring. Like stumbling into the wizard Shazam's cave or finding the crashed ship of the Green Lantern! Hypatia Belicia Cabral finallly had power and a true sense of self... Telling Beeli not to flaunt those curves would have been like asking the persecuted fat kid not to use his recently discovered mutant abilities. With great power comes great responsibility... bullshit. Our girl ran into the future that her new body represented and never ever looked back.

The book still won the Pulitzer prize. The book is steeped in nerd culture, nerd metaphors, and is written in a heavily Dominican Republic voice. The narrator (who's not Oscar De Leong "Wao") clearly is sympathetic to Oscar, but didn't belong in the same universe. The narrator's not revealed until near the middle of the book, and sadly, the identity of the narrator is not of any interest whatsoever to the plot.

So that's the hook that Junot Diaz uses to draw you in. What about the meat? It's mostly about Dominican Republic history. Footnote after footnote discusses the reign of the dictator of Rafael Trujillo, its effects on the lives of its people, and what growing up and raising children of that era is like. Fascinating stuff if you're interested, and read with impatience if you're not.

In the end, I have mixed feelings about this book. The author does a good job of blending nerd culture metaphors into an appropriate narrative. The plot itself is non-existent. If your expectation is that you're reading a Pulitzer prize winning novel that's mainly about the author's voice and the Dominican Republic's history, then I think that's ok. But if you want a good read, the book feels a little empty where the shell is merely there to draw you into reading something that you weren't terribly interested in at the beginning and still aren't interested in at the end.

Let me offer up this recommendation: if you're into the history of the Dominican Republic, read this book cover to cover. If you love the two sample pieces of prose I provided above, go ahead and read the first 10 pages to see if you get sick of it or if it sucks you in. Then feel free to give up after the next 100 pages. If you read till the end to get fulfillment, some sort of redemption, or satisfaction, be prepared to be very disappointed. If you want a Pulitzer prize novel worthy of attention, read Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose instead.

Day 17: Pontresina Hike

We woke up in the morning to dense looking fog and forecast of afternoon rain. Dinner the night before was nothing special, but breakfast actually looked pretty good, with lots of bread, jam, ham, cheese, and fruit juices, we could stuff ourselves full in readiness for the hike. We also met Lydia and Marrijtje. Lydia was a medical student from Chicago who was doing a term in Zurich. Marrijtje was a runner who was in St. Moritz for altitude training, and had spent the last 2 weeks at the hostel. As a result, she knew every menu item for every day in the week!

From Tour of the Alps 2011

After breakfast, Phil and I hopped onto the train to get to the Punt Muragl funicular train. We were disappointed that the train didn't take half priced tickets, but since we were there for the hiking we paid and went to the top. The views from the end station was nothing short of spectacular, and only properly viewed via a panorama viewer:

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Far off in the distance we could see St. Moritz Bad. Below us, we saw the dense fog in the valley we had just left; since we were high above the clouds, we were bathed in sunshine. Any misgivings about paying for the expensive funicular went away with the view.

We hiked along the trail that went along the ridge. I had given Phil the option of hiking to one of the peaks in the area, but he said he wasn't sure how much hiking he was actually capable of, given that he had injured his toe a few weeks before getting on the plane. Even the "low" trail was gorgeous, winding us around pastures with cows that did not have the characteristic cowbells. Peculiarly enough, that made the cows more vocal, and we could hear them mooing away at each other from across the valley.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

The trail went over a stream and then up over a ridge where we could look back and see the train station. Despite being only around 7000 feet we were well above the tree line.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Eventually, even the pasture gave way to scree. But the trail had been built to Swiss standards and we had steps cut into the scree for us to walk on.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We reached a mountain restaurant at 10:30am, but it was too early to lunch, so we pressed on towards Alp Languard. Past the restaurant the trail headed steeply down, in places cable ways were installed so you could hang on to them while hiking.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

While these cableways looked dangerous, we saw folks of all ages doing it, including children around 6 or so. I guess that's why the Swiss are so strong. They get started on the outdoors young and they never give it up.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

At one point we ran into a bunch of Italians who were hiking over to the restaurant we had just left, and they advised us when we got to Alp Languard to go up the mountain for another hour to take in the view of the San Bernina glacier. The area we were at was already pretty, but having climbed Bernina pass last year I was now curious about how the glacier looked.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

The trail turned steeply uphill just before Alp Languard, and as we approached the intersection we were told that trail looped so we could just take any direction we liked and we would get to the same place. We decided to pick the less steep trail, which happened to be right off a stream.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We finally got to Cafe Paradis, which had the view of the glacier. Behind the mountains we saw tendrils of fog floating over the peaks, threatening to invade where we were. There was no sign of the promised rain, however, so we were in luck! "I guess we can hike all the way down to Pontresina and save on the cable fare!" I told Phil. We were out of water and there were no free water fountains anywhere nearby, so we were forced to pay 6CHF per bottle from Paradis for more water.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

The descent from Paradis down to Pontresina was short but steep. It started with a bunch of stairs and then turned into a regular trail that was nevertheless steep enough to make me wish I had hiking sticks.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

We had eaten all the food we had brought, so when we got to town we headed to the supermarket for more ice cream, fruit, and chocolate.

At dinner (which was spaghetti with as many different types of sauce as we wanted), we caught up again with Lydia and Marrijtje. Lydia was going out for an evening run after dinner as the sun was still out and it looked like it would be a nice sunset. Not being runners we declined to join her, but that gave us an idea. We picked up our bikes from bike storage and rode around St Moritz Lake instead. It was blocked in one direction for cyclists but riding it all the way around from the other direction was ok. The sun set over the mountains just as we finished our little after dinner jaunt.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

All was not well in St. Moritz Bad, unfortunately. The hostel decided to place a fourth person in our room, and he stunk. Literally. After smelling him for 2 minutes I couldn't stand it any more and told him pointedly to take a shower. Unfortunately, despite the shower he didn't smell any better. Phil (who had a more sensitive nose but also had a bunk near the window) told me later that not only did he stink, all his stuff stunk too. So not only had he not showered for months, he hadn't done laundry for months.

Fortunately, with enough hiking, sleep over took me fast enough.
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Day 16: Zurich to St. Moritz Bad

I woke up around 4:45am so XiaoQin and I could catch the 5:00am bus to the airport for her 6:45am flight. While at the airport, I noticed that there was an option for checking in the luggage the evening before (Air Berlin calls it the "late night check-in", but since it started from 7:00pm until 9:00pm, it was hardly late at night). This normally cost 5CHF per person, but both Phil and I had the TopBonus service card so we wouldn't even have to pay that fee. This would eliminate all the stress of getting in line first thing in the morning and would get us an extra half hour or so of sleep.

Once XiaoQin was safely into the hands of the Swiss equivalent of the TSA, I went back to the hotel and started researching trains to St. Moritz. Last year while in the Canadian Rockies, I met Petra Fassler, who had several hikes to recommend in the area, and looking at Arturo's photos also from last year, it definitely seemed like a place worth visiting. The earliest train left at 10:00am, so I woke Phil up, we repacked our bags on the assumption that we would ship our hiking clothes and shoes back to the hotel, and headed off on the 4 hour train journey.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Even the train ride was spectacular, hinting at the possibilities to come. The train tunneled through mountains on high bridges and gave us high views of the surrounding villages. Unfortunately, the closer we got to St. Moritz the worse the weather. By the time we got to St. Moritz proper, it was mostly overcast with a hint of blue sky.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

I had previously booked the youth hostel at St. Moritz because it was cheaper than the other youth hostels (which didn't include a mountain train pass), and because I was worried that arriving on a Friday, we'd have a hard time finding lodging. I asked at the tourist information center where the hostel was, and it turned out to be at the far end of St. Moritz Bad (the town). We first went to the supermarket to have lunch, then rode over to the hostel. The hostel had WiFi, complementary lunch and dinner for the price of the stay, laundry facilities, and a bike locker/ski room. It was too late to do any serious hiking, but the hostel staff suggested walking over to Pontresina.

The walk led us through a forest with an exercise circuit and various other accouterments. It started raining right after we started walking. We had brought a long our rain gear and hiking umbrella, so we were good to go regardless.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

At the far end, we got to the Pontresina train station and rather than walk back the same way in the rain, decided to hop onto the train and catch a bus afterwards. Since we had half-price cards with us it was relatively cheap to do so. We stopped by the supermarket again to stock up on drinks so we wouldn't have to pay the outrageous youth hostel prices, as well as lunch for the next day, as we planned to spend most of the day hiking.

That night, we discovered that we would not be alone in our room, as they hostel had assigned an elderly Japanese gentlemen to our room. As far as we could tell, he only stayed in bed during our whole stay. We would talk to him and he would claim that he went out and went places, but he was always in bed when we left and in bed when we came back so we could never tell.

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Day 15: Carouge to Zurich

From Jennie's apartment in Geneva, Saleve dominates the landscape. All dinner we could see the light on the mountain, which was shaped in my mind the same as Uluru, but of course much more forested and in a much friendlier climate.

It looked clear as we rode towards the West end of Saleve, which according to Raphael was the gentler climb, but when we got to the views, we saw that the day was indeed murky. We were denied the sight of Mont Blanc yet again!

From Tour of the Alps 2011

A little further climbing and steep descents brought us, however, to nice clear views of Geneva and its surrounds. It's always great to have a local show you the roads because you always end up with the least traffic'd sections.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

After the ride, Jennie prepared a spaghetti lunch which we ate with gusto, and then it was time for us to make the long drive back to Zurich where we had to return the car for XiaoQin to catch her flight early the next morning. We got to Zurich with plenty of time to spare, though gassing up the car turned out to be more trouble than expected as every gas station rejected my credit cards and ATM cards. I finally dumped what's left of my cash into one machine and fortunately it was sufficient to gas up the car.

We then spent the rest of the evening in Zurich, where the bookshop did not have Motorrad Reisekarten Alpen which both Phil and Cynthia wanted. We would end up ordering it from Amazon.de and having it shipped to our hotel. We walked around old town where I bought a pair of gloves to replace a pair that had mysteriously gotten lost on tour. We then got caught in the rain after dinner, but not before a final picture for XiaoQin to remember Zurich by.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

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Day 14: Beaufort to Carouge

We woke up in the morning to cloudy skies but after breakfast I still hoped that there was a chance to make it up Cormet Roseland before it started raining. Halfway up the hairpin turns a couple of cross country skiiers on long roller blades passed me, along with their support van. Professional or near professional cross-country skiiers "ski" up the passes in the summer as training, but the skis make for awkward descents so they're always accompanied by a support van to bring them down the mountain. Apparently riding a bicycle wouldn't have been sufficient training.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

By the time I got to the lake the first rain drops had started to fall, and the church we saw yesterday looked a lot gloomier. Phil had pressed on ahead but as I rode around the rain got heavy. Having climbed Cormet Roseland in near perfect weather I felt no need to ride it in the rain, so I turned around and went back to Beaufort where I found XiaoQin and we grabbed a table for lunch just as Phil showed up.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Driving out of the Alps took us to Mont Blanc country, where we got views of the mountains but they were occluded at the peaks by clouds. We found Jennie's place after having to get out of the car and walk around and call her. Her apartment was so new that it showed up correctly neither on Google Maps nor on the Garmin GPS units.

While driving, the dust cap on my valve stem had gotten too close to the exhaust and hence melted off, coating the screw cap as well as the threads on the valve stem. I hadn't been able to fix it, but we hadn't had any flats for two weeks so I was content to leave it on. But at Jennie's place, we were supplied with an exacto knife and after about 10 minutes of work I managed to scrape off most of it. 5 minutes later my valve stem was good as new!

From Tour of the Alps 2011

I had originally thought I'd needed to go to a bike shop to buy a new tail light, but Jennie's husband Raphael was an avid cyclist and had a spare LED light that worked with my bike and generously donated it to me!

Dinner was a dish new to me: Raclette, grilled meat and cheese. We must have been hungry because everything on the table was gone after an hour.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Raphael promised us a ride on the Saleve the next day, so we weren't actually done with French riding, though we were sleeping in Switzerland.
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Day 13: Saint Michel Maurienne to Beaufort

We woke up to clear skies and a beautiful day, so Col De L'Iseran it is! Saint Michel Maurienne was quite a ways from the bottom of the Col de L'Iseran climb, so we opted to drive to Bonneval-sur-Arc, passing Col Madelaine on the way, which I must have ridden over in 2005, but at that time probably considered too small a col to be of note.

The skies stayed clear when we got started and indeed, the weather was perfect. It wasn't cold or windy, and it was nice and warm, and we were climbing the easy side of the pass. What's not to like? We passed mountain goats on the trailside before turning the corner and watching the views open up.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From the summit, the views were considerably less interesting and there was a strong headwind on the descent which made for some pedaling. Nevertheless, we got a good view of the Val D'Isere, which is a ski resort town. Pedaling past the uninteresting ski town of Val D'Isere, the road enters several long tunnels which were a pleasant respite from the heat in 2005, but now were a little scary on a fastish descent with unlit galleries and moderately high speed traffic. I became acutely aware that my tail-light had fallen off and destroyed itself earlier in the tour and regretted not remembering to replace it.

At Saint-Foy Tarentaise, I stopped at an intersection and texted XiaoQin to see where she was. To my surprise she showed up in person as she had parked right around the corner and had run out of money on her prepaid Swisscom SIM. We waited in the shade until Phil showed up and drove down to Bourg St. Maurice. I didn't remember anything to recommend Bourg St. Maurice, so when the tourist information center told us that there was lodging available up Cormet Roseland, I jumped at it as an opportunity to get away from the heat.

The Bourg St. Maurice side of Cormet Roseland was steep and climbed away fast, but when we got to the lodging it didn't look very appealing to XiaoQin, though the price seemed very nice to Phil. Remembering the Beaufort was pretty and had good lodging, I suggested we go there, stopping by various places on Cormet Roseland for photos.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

The plan was to visit my friend Jennie Chen near Geneva tomorrow afternoon, but we would have the morning to climb it. Beaufort was just as pretty as I remembered it, and we found lodging at a reasonable price. The room was cool and there was a nice supermarket and a small downtown area to walk around in.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Our hotel even had parking! We took the half pension and got a good meal out of it.

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Extracting Music off the Ipod

I tried to get XiaoQin to switch from her ipod to using her Android phone as an MP3 player. The big bonus here is that she can delete tracks she doesn't like from the phone, while the ipod interface for that is pretty clunky, if it exists at all. (It didn't exist in the old ipods I had)

It turns out that this is actually non-trivial, since Apple purposely makes it hard. If you do an appropriate Google search you'll come up with a bunch of solutions, but many of them are badly written programs. Some crash, some don't handle unicode, and some don't even understand how to do de-duplication. The solution is Sharepod. This is the best of the lot and runs smoothly without issues.

Recommended.

First Impressions: Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Hybrid Drive

My SSD "upgrade" has been nothing but disaster. Judging by other people's experiences what I experienced has been pretty typical. If you're a heavy duty user who keeps his machine on all the time, spinning platters are still more reliable, though it's quite conceivable that the Intel SSDs don't fail at the rate mine has. Suffice to say, I started looking for alternatives.

One that came to mind was the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive. This is particularly attractive for laptop applications because the capacity is large (up to 500GB) and most laptops only have one drive bay. While most people don't run demanding applications and hence can make do with 100GB hard drives, I install Lightroom, Photoshop, and InDesign, and on my most recent trip for instance transferred 72GB worth of photos to the laptop for processing during the flight. Furthermore, laptops have to startup and shut down frequently, so the 4GB read-only SSD cache seems like it would be just the ticket. Since I expect to use the laptop as my primary machine next week while on a trip, it seemed like the right time to take the plunge to see if the hybrid drive lives up to the glowing reviews.

The X201 has a great drive bay, as you can see on YouTube. This is pretty important because it turned out that I had to swap hard drives multiple times. The first thing I tried was a Windows Recovery Disk moved onto a USB flash drive and recovering from an image back up on an external hard drive. No go. Then I tried installing Windows 7 Ultimate to see if that would let me store from back up. No go. It turned out that my Windows 7 license was locked to my laptop, and I had to burn to DVD/CDs from the original HDD. So back went the HDD and I tried to burn to a portable DVD burner, but my portable burner turned out to be broken, disconnecting itself after 10 minutes of use. (It came off a 8 year old PC, so maybe that's to be expected) OK, how about burning to my 8GB USB Flash drive? The lenovo factory program gave up because it claimed the disk space was too small. OK, how about this external HDD with 500GB of free space? OK, this time it worked.

By this time I was pretty frustrated. I then swapped back the hybrid drive, and then tried to boot off the external HDD. No go. I then stuck the external HDD to my desktop. To my surprise, the recovery data was only 6GB. So why the heck did it claim my flash drive wasn't big enough? Ok, no problem, I copied over the factory data onto my flash drive and booted off it. Magic! Now my laptop was back to the factory state and I had to reinstall all the software (after deactivating all the old software). I didn't bother trying to recover the old data because fortunately, the photos had all been long imported to my desktop, and everything else was safely stored in Dropbox (I'd long abandoned Google docs as being too unusable compared to Dropbox).

After all the installs and running dropbox to sync everything up, my laptop now boots in 25s (half the previous time), logs in in 2s, and starts chrome pretty much instantaneously. This is indeed the SSD experience at $99, and without any sacrifice in capacity (in fact, my disk capacity went up!). So my first impressions are very positive. I'll wait to see how the laptop survives in normal use, but I would consider buying another one (along with an appropriate mounting bracket) for the desktop! Recommended, assuming you're the kind of person who doesn't mind losing about half a day to all those crazy things I had to do.

Day 12: Briancon to Saint Michel Maurienne

Blues skies greeted us when we moved out of the hotel, but gray skies met us on the road on Col du Lauterat. By the time we got to thee intersection with Col du Galibier, rain drops had started falling on our helmets.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Nevertheless, the Galibier was beautiful, even in the drizzle, and climbing on wet roads didn't generate enough spray to even get our bikes muddy, so we pressed on, enjoying the view.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Ahead of us, however, rain blocked our views of the surrounding peaks, and we could see that we would soon be in heavy rain.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Sure enough, by the time we got to the top it was 5C and raining, though not horribly hard. We had climbed the gentle side of the Galibier, and would be descending the steep side with its 10% grade. I was cold, Phil looked cold, so the decision to get into the car and drive down was easy. I harbored thoughts of climbing Col Telegraphe, but it kept raining all through lunch and all the way up the Telegraphe as well, so I gave up on the idea and we drove to St. Michel Maurienne to find lodging. St. Michel was a non descript town with nothing to recommend it, but it gave us the choice of routes for the next day: Col De L'Iseran if the weather was good, and Col du Madelaine if the weather was iffy.

We ended up staying at a dorm-like hotel for about 30 Euros/head, and at dinner, my coke glass looked like a can of coke.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

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Day 11: Barcelonette to Briancon

The plan for today was to climb Col du Vars, but Arjan told us the day before that if he had to choose, he'd rather ride Vallouise Valley. Between our worn out state from yesterday and the need to get to Briancon today since I had unfinished business with the Gallibier, we decided to try his suggestion.

The day was warm as we got started. I set a cut off time so we'd make it to Briancon with enough time to enjoy the day. By the time the cut off happened we were in a shaded climb and it was such a pity to stop, but stop we did for lunch and then drove on to Briancon, which was in such a crowded state that we parked illegally in the free parking lot. It turned out that we arrived in Briancon during its medieval weekend!

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

"In the US, all the Renaissance fairs look fake because the context is wrong. But here in the castle town, it's actually appropriate and looks right!" said Phil. Indeed, the streets were strewn with hay, horses and fire breathers walking around didn't feel wrong, and the general mood was festival. There were even pretend street beggars, so you didn't just get the sanitized view of the middle ages. And yes, with horses around, the streets stank!

From Tour of the Alps 2011

The question became could we find lodging? This being a Sunday, that turned out to be no problem. We ended up with a 3 person room at the Auberg De La Paix, the same place Mike & I stayed at in 2005.

Since we had the entire afternoon free, we enjoyed walking around gawking at the medieval fair, and also scouted all the restaurants in town before finding Duck Confit at Le Gavroche. The restaurant was decorated with bicycles, and the food was the best of the trip.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

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Day 10: Col du Parpaillon

One of the highlights of the 2005 Tour was Col du Parpaillon, a gorgeous off-road pass that was isolated and pretty --- perfect for a Saturday ride when the asphalt would be full of weekend warriors. Since we had a car, we could drive all the way to near Embrun, get dropped off, and then ride back to Barcelonette without a load. The last time we did this, I had 25mm tires, and I expected the ride to be a snap with 28mm tires.

Well, the drive to Embrun took much longer than expected, so despite an 8am start we only got started around 10:00am. We started riding, took a wrong turn, and then came back and met a mountain biker on the road going up to Col du Parpaillon as well. His name was Arjan, and he worked at CERN as a physicist, and was traveling to see a friend elsewhere in France, stopping here and there to ride his mountain bike. He seemed a little disappointed to see that the trail was expected to be so non-technical that roadies on touring bikes were going to climb it.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

The road eventually turned into dirt as expected and we found ourselves climbing in the shade for a kilometer or so before getting up into the sun with the expected clear views. "I was cursing your name for a bit down there," said Phil, "but the road is now a lot easier to ride."

From Tour of the Alps 2011

In a little bit, we encountered another cyclist coming down the road on a cycle cross bike. Unlike American cross bikes his bike had long-reach caliper brakes, a superior design. He warned us that the tunnel had ice that was a foot tall, and while he could normally ride it on his cross bike, this time he had to walk. I was pretty happy about that, since that meant there would be no cars on this ride.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

As we got higher, the views got prettier and we stopped for lunch at an empty hut. We felt blessed by the weather and the scenery.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Towards the top, almost all vegetation was gone as we approached the stream crossing. On 28mm tires we could just ride it without any concern whatsoever. The views took on characteristics of very high mountains, though unfortunately my happiness about traffic proved futile. Despite the tunnel being closed there were a lot of SUVs on the road, though many were forced to turn around at the tunnel.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

At the tunnel were a pair of 70-year-old cyclists who had climbed it on their mountain bikes and were about to ride through. Arjan and I waited until Phil caught up, and then we proceeded into the tunnel.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

With powerful battery lights, this time I felt competent to tackle the tunnel. I rode the first 500 meters until I could barely see, and then I tried walking for a bit but at one point ran into water that just ran across the width of the tunnel, terminating in some ice. Since getting feet soaked was a guarantee with further walking, I got on the bike and rode to the ice, managing to hop onto the ice on foot without getting my feet more than just a bit splashed on by wheels. What was in front of me, however, was hilarious.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

A car driven two people had ignored the tunnel closed sign and driven in anyway. This car had gotten stuck inside the tunnel on the ice. This was no problem for a cyclist, since a cyclist could just walk past the car. However, the drivers had enlisted a bunch of motorcyclists who were wearing rubber riding boots to push their car along. With a lot of shouting, cursing, and screaming they finally pushed the car through. The two drivers were lucky, since as a cyclist wearing cleated shoes rather than rubber boots, I would not have been able to help even if I wanted to. To prove that stupidity belonged to all genders and nationalities, on the other side of the tunnel I noticed that the drivers looked French and were women.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

Poor Phil got his socks wet inside the tunnel, and so had to wring out his socks. I spied saw that the motorcycles were about to get going, and I did not want to be stuck behind the two idiot drivers, so I followed the motorcyclists down. A bunch of ATVs were coming up the road as well, but fortunately for me, they slowed the car down far more than they slowed me down. Near the bottom I waited at the hut which was closed today and had no food, but Phil didn't show up for 10 minutes. I let the car past and then rode down to the intersection with asphalt and waited there.

From Tour of the Alps 2011

From Tour of the Alps 2011

I waited for half an hour but Phil finally showed up looking no worse for wear, though he said that I had reset his calibration for what a lot of off-road riding was. The ride back was uneventful, but I was more tired than expected given the lack of a load. The problem with getting older is that my days of daily riding 2000m and 100km seem to be over.
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