First Day in the Saddle

The place were staying at, in La Cote d'Aime, is around 13 km from the foot of the climb to the Cormet de Roseland. It starts inBourg-Saint-Maurice. La Cote d'Aime is high above Aime, which itself is in the floor of the Isere valley, to the west of Bourg-Saint-Maurice.

The best cycling route, to the start of the climb, remains above high above the valley for most of its length. Angela decide to ride to Bourg-Saint-Maurice and back, while I tackled the Cormet de Roseland itself.

View west along the Isere valley from the route to Bourg-Saint-Maurice

Climbing out of La Cote d'Aime, the first 3 km are the hardest, with gradients regularly above 7%. After that they ease and eventually the route becomes flat for a while before plunging down into Bourg-Saint-Maurice. The route goes through the busy centre of the town, but soon, the route up to the Roseland beckons. As with all famous apline climbs, there are markers every kilometre to let you know how much, or in my case how little, you have achieved. Also, as on other climbs, the gradients for each kilometer are a bit misleading.

Heading away from Bourg-Saint-Maurice the initial gradients, on the D902, are in the 6-8% range and the route is relatively straight until it reaches an impressive set of hairpins just above les Glinettes. On the way you pass the sad remains of what must have been an epic water park, at Bonneval-les-Bains. The crumbling concrete and graffiti still can't hide the outline of the swimming pool and a large water slide.

Once past the hairpins, the route straightens once more, following the Torrent des Glaciers, which brings melt water down from the glaciers around Mont Blanc.

The glaciers that provide the water for the Torrent des Glaciers, together with people camping in what can only be described as the flood plain!

After this straighter section a final set of hairpins delivers you onto another relatively straight section that leads to the summit. By this time, the showers that had been forecast for today had started, so I remained there only long enough to eat part of an energy bar, to let Angela know I'd made it and to take the now obligatory summit photograph.

There were a number of bikes at the summit today. Mine's the one on the right. Irritatingly, it looks as though there was an insect on the lens when I took it!

The route from La Cote d'Aime to the Cormet de Roseland is available on Garmin Connect.

The light was not good for general photography today. Here is a picture taken yesterday when conditions were much nicer.

View east from the Cormet de Roseland.

Getting back down was remarkably easy. Most of the way down gravity did the work. The hairpins require a lot of breaking and at one point I did stop to make sure my rims were not overheating.

The route back down from the Cormet de Roseland is available on Garmin Connect.

The final leg of the ride was the return to La Cote d'Aime. There were two choices. Either I could retrace my steps taking the route above the valley that I'd used earlier, or I could ride along the other side of the valley, and then climb up to La Cote d'Aime from Aime. In the event I chose the latter.

The ride along the valley is easy. It does climb, but the gradients are modest at around 3%. However, the climb out of Aime is a brute. It's mostly an unrelenting 8% and when it varies from this it's only to go steeper!

The return route from Bourg-Saint-Maurice is available on Garmin Connect.

So after around 70 km of riding and lots of climbing, the kit seems to be holding up as do my climbing legs. So far so good.