On tour, I have a policy of pushing the breakfast pace. If the hotel said they served breakfast at 7:30am, I’d show up at 7:20am. Usually, they’d let you into the breakfast room even if the hot coffee wasn’t available yet so you could begin the fueling needed to get you up the next mountain pass. I ate like I was eating for two, though neither Boen nor Arturo never reached the levels of hunger I reached during the trip, they ate too. Boen would have hot chocolate for breakfast today, but after this he realized that he didn’t actually enjoy hot chocolate that much and stopped asking for it.
The climb from Handegg to the Grimsel summit is a series of stair steps, each step taking you to the reservoir/power generating dam up in a series. All through the ride on this day we would be passed by heavy equipment trucks. I’d assumed that this was normal summer road construction season traffic but once past the first set of dam I saw that they were building another dam and power plant! It never fails to amaze me that European democracies never lost their ability to build one amazing civil engineering project after another while California and the USA despite continuous water shortages and the recognized need for green energy cannot seem to build with the same scale the Swiss or even the Italians can.
Each level of reservoir was pretty and granted you relief as well as a nice view of another set of hotels and lakes, but getting to the top of Grimsel pass took my breath away, for the summit lake was almost completely frozen. I’d never seen it this way before in past years, and it really brought home to me how much late snow fall the Alps has had this year.
From the top of Grimsel pass you can see Furka pass a couple of hundred meters taller, with the big drop to Gletsch down below. I showed Boen the view but he showed no sign of dismay, knowing that the Furka was closed. “Look at that Arturo, it looks ridable!” Indeed, there was no snow on the road all the way to Hotel Belvedere. On my single bike I would have risked riding over the Furka, trusting my ability to posthole across the pass if needed in exchange for a car free ride. With a tandem and a 9-year old in tow that was not a possibility so we put on all our jackets and warm weather gear and headed down at full speed towards Gletsch. The descent is a delight, with every hairpin engineered by the Swiss to be almost flat --- you only need to brake on entering the hairpin and nowhere else, going at full speed between corners.
Arturo took a look at the train and observed: “Hey, all those sports cars that passed us earlier are also on the same train!” Indeed, cars that would normally also head over the Furka were forced onto the same train we were, and the train has the capacity to take cars through the tunnel!
Onboard the train with us were several cyclists from other countries and a couple from Switzerland. All of them wanted to exit the train on Realp to minimize time on the train and avoid the climb from the Hospital train station. I told them that there’s usually a headwind from Realp to the Hospital intersection. “I’m impressed! I live in Switzerland and I don’t know about the prevailing winds.” “Well, we might be early enough that the wind is a non-issue.” Nevertheless, I’d take a climb over a headwind any day, so we watched as others unloaded in Realp and got off in Hospental as planned.
Out of the train, we filled up our water bottles at the water fountains in town but neglected to eat luch at any of the open restaurants, reasoning that there was one at the intersection with the St. Gotthard pass road. Well, that restaurant was closed on Mondays, so we ended up eating our emergency food instead. “St Gotthard is a much easier climb than Grimsel. Just avoid the butt massage on the old road.”
We rode up the hill. This was Arturo’s second day and he was lagging a bit, but tandems cannot slow down, especially since our tandem has a higher low gear than his low gear, so we had to maintain our pace. The skies were cloudy but not more than 2 drops of rain fell on us during the first part of the climb. At the intersection with the old road I neglected the bike path sign and kept plowing on into the gallery to the top of the pass, only realizing that Arturo was nowhere in sight just before the gallery. I quickly stopped and texted him not to follow the bike path sign only for him to reply that it was too late! I texted him that on the descent he was to ignore bike path signs as well and just follow the car road as far as he could.
At the city limit sign for Airolo I spotted a garage and pulled to a stop to wait for Arturo, who took a good 20 minutes to catch up with us. In the mean time I did some research and found hotels in Airolo and Biasca. Once he arrived I pointed out that while Biasca was nearly 2 hours away it was 2 hours of descent, and we’d be able to start tomorrow’s climb up Lukmanier with ease. “I’m basically done for the day,” Arturo said reluctantly. We decided to go get some supermarket food for lunch first before deciding. We found a Coop just 5 minutes away. Uncharacteristically, the elevator was broken and we had to walk down 3 flights of stairs to buy our lunch. Despite that setback after lunch we all felt better and decided to ride down to Biasca.
The descent was fast and an easy ride as promised, with us picking up the bike path only when the fun part of the descent was better. We’d picked a relatively cheap hotel right in downtown Biasca with a shared bathroom. But when we got there it was quite clear that Mondays were slow days and our “shared bathroom” was effectively only used by us.
We walked to the pizza restaurant just 20 minutes away, obviating the need for an after dinner walk. Along the way, I saw to my amazement two intersecting waterfalls coming from the hills above us. “Hate to disappoint you, Piaw, but it’s clearly artificial. There’s two culverts above and they’re just aimed past each other.” It was pretty anyway.
