velotel
04-24-2015, 02:34 AM
Up early, sun lurking behind the mass of Mont Ventoux, birds chanting in nearby fruit orchards, nice looking buffet breakfast laid out. Get a coffee, spread out my map on the table, check out roads to the south. I like maps with contour lines and color shadings and searching out potential rides. I knew what we were going to ride but grazed my eyes over the map anyway. Kept returning to this little road out of the village of Monieux that looked interesting. The vague plan was ride to Flassan then Villes-sur-Auzon where we’d catch the Gorges de la Nesque road. After that maybe to Sault and back up Mont Ventoux. Never ridden that road, the easy way up Ventoux, at least until Chalet Reynard where it joins the road from Bédoin. Going up Ventoux again wasn’t ringing any bells for me. But a wandering loop through the hills south of Ventoux, that idea I liked.
Standing out on the map was what looked like a main road from Sault to Villes-sur-Auzon crossing the hills north of the Gorges de la Nesque. More interesting was a fainter line squiggling through the same hills and eventually arriving at Flassan. If I’d been alone, that would have been the call without hesitation. But maybe Mat would want to bag Ventoux from Sault. The sun popped over the distant ridge about the same he strolled in. Showed him what I was thinking; he agreed, didn’t feel any need to revisit Ventoux. Time for something new.
Ate, packed, checked out, left the car at the hotel, rolled off and turned left onto the road to Flassan. The fun meter spun up instantly. Narrow road darting down across fields, past orchards under clouds of white blossoms, past vineyards lined up like skinny chorus girls kicking out one leg. In the background the white/gray summit of Mont Ventoux looking far away. Flew through Flassan, charged down to Villes-sur-Auzon. Had to stop, too picturesque to blow through. Off again, the road to Gorges de la Nesque. I’d read that it’s a great ride. Mat had a friend back in Boulder who’d told him it was the best he’d ever ridden. So far it was good riding but nothing particularly exceptional. A gentle climb up into hills covered with a forest of what looked like mostly scrub oak. Both of us were carrying a pretty good pace on our big rings, which for me is almost unheard of. I mean we were clearly gaining altitude but so softly that the big ring was the natural call. Amazingly I did almost the entire climb on the big ring. I’m sure Mat did ride it all the way.
I was thoroughly enjoying myself but also kept thinking that Mat’s friend who considered this the best road he’d ever ridden really needed to come back to France and ride in the Alps. I mean I was enjoying the views but it wasn’t like they were screaming at me to stop and shoot. Except for the hedges along the way, those I had to get some pictures of. Instead of just cutting back the shrubs along the road, the road department guys like to amuse themselves by trimming them back into shapes. Like the hidden artists in the road workers were let loose and told to do whatever they wanted. And they’d been doing it for a long time because these are slow growing shrubs. Achieving the almost surrealistic shapes they formed was the work of years of careful trimming. Made us smile the whole time we were riding by.
I kept wondering where the gorges were. All I saw was a broad, V-shaped valley steadily deepening and narrowing with occasional outcrops of limestone the road sliced across. Never did see a gorge. Finally came around a corner and spotted up ahead in the distance the road carved out of a cliff with a tunnel in the rock face. Ah ha, at last we get to what Mat’s friend had exclaimed about.
Three tunnels in all, the first short with just a fat pillar of rock out on a point defining the tunnel. The next two were a little longer and kind of just angled into massive buttresses of gray limestone then popped out the other side. And that was it, the road curved left and started a long glide down towards the village of Monieux. There was a small parking at the summit and a lookout point supported by rock walls with a view down into the gorge and back towards Mont Ventoux. Ventoux looked a long, long ways away. And getting to Sault meant continuing to ride away from the mountain. Looking at that distance made me glad that wasn’t where we were heading. Must be a huge loop.
I stopped, walked up onto the lookout, shot some pics, checked out the views, a pretty place, peaceful, still didn’t see what all the excitement was about. Mat’s friend really, really needs to ride some of the cliff roads in the Vercors and above Bourg d’Oisans. The big question now was do we turn around and discover just how fast a downhill going back must be, or forge ahead and do the loop. Huge temptation turning around because that has to be a fantastically fast return. But both of us like doing loops so forward it was, on to Monieux.
From the lookout to the village wasn’t far off flat, sometimes gentle up, sometimes gentle down, a wee bit more of the latter than the former. I’d told Mat I’d seen this little road that cut across the triangle formed by the road from Monieux to Sault and the road from Sault to Villes-sur-Auzon. Looked like it might even be a chemin, some forest road lazily angling up through the forest. No sign for it when we got to Monieux so we just took the first road up into the village and started looking for a fountain since all four of our bottles were dry by then. Small village, typically picturesque of south France, and mostly closed up. Got to the village square and a major surprise next to a prominent fountain gushing the fresh water we needed, a super attractive gourmet restaurant. Checked it out on the net after we got home and apparently it’s as good as it looked. I kept thinking where in the heck are the people coming from who eat here. I mean the village is small, like I doubt it could even support a bakery. The nearest town of any size at all is Sault, and I don’t think Sault is exactly a thriving metropolis. But here’s this fancy restaurant with the kind of prices you’d expect from a gourmet restaurant in a speck of a village out in the middle of nowhere. Kind of crazy.
We filled up bottles, headed off looking for our shortcut. Spotted it angling up the slope. Actually angling up doesn’t really tell the story. This puppy is steep, like double digits from the get-go. But at least it looked like it flattened out where it appeared to curve to the left so I just settled in and ground it out figuring I could bag a rolling rest at the top. Meanwhile Mat just flat attacked it. I got to where the road curved left and looked ahead. And yea, the pitch slacked off a bit, like maybe from mid double digits to low double digits. But only for a moment. Then it got steeper. I stopped and barely stayed upright.
This was a climb from hell. From the start of festivities to the end was just slightly over a K in length. I stopped five times in that K! And every time I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get started again. I was looking at having to for the first time ever get off my bike and push it up the hill. We’re talking desperate. But in the end I didn’t; I made it without walking. Barely. Mat would have ridden it non-stop but about halfway up he decided he’d maybe better stop and wait to see if I was still on the way because he sure as hell didn’t want to have to ride back down it and then ride up it again. So he stopped until he saw me coming up, slowly but surely. His Garmin showed grades in the high twenties. I think they were more like in the high thirties, minimum! So much for my forest road lazily wandering up the hillside. Amazingly, and thankfully, this beast was paved the whole way up. If it hadn’t been would have been a hike-a-bike for this pilgrim. One K, five stops, what more can I say. Some shortcut!
Mat was waiting for me at the top, the junction with the highway, and I just kind of rode right past him in a sort of dumb daze and continued up the road spinning the legs, letting the body slowly recover. Surprisingly didn’t take long. And with that we were off, wide road, wide shoulders, smooth blacktop, easy grades, cars flying by, the contrast couldn’t have been more blatant. A K plus later we were back on our kind of roads, narrow, rough, no shoulders, no lines, straight a foreign concept. Apparently it’s the old highway. The new highway instantly transformed it into a bike path, but still open to cars since I think we met one along the way. We were still climbing but so easily that there we were back on our big rings! Pretty crazy, really, from a wall of hell to cruiser city with zero transition.
I think we were carrying a pretty good pace across the hill but in truth don’t really remember. The riding was so easy we flying along and carrying on conversations at the same time. No idea what we were talking about. No doubt riding, probably my book that’s at the printer’s, stuff that popped into one mind or the other. Just rolling through a forest of pines on some hill in south France with occasional views of Mont Ventoux in the distance. Every time I saw it I was glad we were where we were instead on the mountain. This was pure fun, not some gladiator’s battle, with some ten K of high speed rolling on the big ring, small cog, the road jiggling and swerving, sometimes up, sometimes down.
After maybe ten K or so we crossed the highway we’d been on briefly earlier. The crossing was the only smooth pavement we’d seen since we turned off the highway. Then back onto our bumpy, nervous, sometimes gravely pseudo bike path in the woods. Maybe a K and a half later we discovered the surprise of the day, maybe even the surprise of our trip south in fact. Popped out of the trees, curled around a hard turn to the left, and the road dove down the hillside. Instant acceleration, gravity pulling hard. An eight K descent, average grade just under 6% or so. Rode steeper because the road kept diving into these round turns that almost every time spilled out into a flat or even a small climb. What was really wild here was that I think everyone of these turns was banked like they were made for fast moving bikes. I’d come into them carrying a load of speed with a finger floating over each brake lever ready to shed some speed and just about every single time I didn’t brake. Couple of times, maybe more, I felt like I was right on the edge for speed and wondering if maybe shedding a little wouldn’t be a good idea but every time the speed and the arc blended together just right. No idea what kind of speeds we hit, other than faster than I could spin a 50/12 combo.
Kicking up the excitement factor was a road surface bucking and jiggling around with strips and patches of gravel and sand in lots of the turns. And every time we raised our eyes off the road for an instant, there was the Ventoux soaring up into a blue sky. Not that we looked very often, no way, this was one descent that demanded our complete attention all the way down. I loved it, so did Mat. This may seem a sacrilege but for me the plunge off Ventoux pales compared to this puppy. I mean dropping off Ventoux is just about pointing the bike down and holding on. Grades are steep so it’s automatically fast but most of the time the road’s pretty straight or the turns are long, drawn out affairs like up on the upper slopes. This little back road to Flassan was technically demanding, had a sweet rhythm of longer turns mixed with tight curves and all of them round and smooth, the arc, not the road surface. Plus the tighter turns were friggin banked with the exit a flowing increasing radius arc. Could have kept going for twice as long as far as I was concerned but still, some 450 meters of drop wasn’t too bad.
We flashed through Flassan, hit the road back to Ste Colombe and back into the vineyards and cherry trees in full bloom. I was thinking back to the hotel would be a slow uphill given the speeds we hit coming down. I think I rode it all on my big ring; I’m sure Mat did. A sweet ending to a fine day. Gorges de la Nesque, a good ride, wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it anyone who’s in the area but I don’t think I’d make a special trip to ride it. Then again that descent to Flassan, oh la, wouldn’t mind doing a repeat of that. Holy smokes is that ever fun!
Bikes on the roof, back to the Alps, Mat’s third day here, and in three days the big ride, my traditional anniversary ride. I usually do that alone, just works out like that. But not this year, this year I’m celebrating big time, turning 70, riding with Mat, Maxn, and another young friend and I’ve got maybe a humdinger of a ride planned for the day. A four col tour with col number three a complete unknown with the potential for some sweet surprises, or maybe some rude surprises. And my legs are toast! Could be interesting.
Some pics. Cheers
Standing out on the map was what looked like a main road from Sault to Villes-sur-Auzon crossing the hills north of the Gorges de la Nesque. More interesting was a fainter line squiggling through the same hills and eventually arriving at Flassan. If I’d been alone, that would have been the call without hesitation. But maybe Mat would want to bag Ventoux from Sault. The sun popped over the distant ridge about the same he strolled in. Showed him what I was thinking; he agreed, didn’t feel any need to revisit Ventoux. Time for something new.
Ate, packed, checked out, left the car at the hotel, rolled off and turned left onto the road to Flassan. The fun meter spun up instantly. Narrow road darting down across fields, past orchards under clouds of white blossoms, past vineyards lined up like skinny chorus girls kicking out one leg. In the background the white/gray summit of Mont Ventoux looking far away. Flew through Flassan, charged down to Villes-sur-Auzon. Had to stop, too picturesque to blow through. Off again, the road to Gorges de la Nesque. I’d read that it’s a great ride. Mat had a friend back in Boulder who’d told him it was the best he’d ever ridden. So far it was good riding but nothing particularly exceptional. A gentle climb up into hills covered with a forest of what looked like mostly scrub oak. Both of us were carrying a pretty good pace on our big rings, which for me is almost unheard of. I mean we were clearly gaining altitude but so softly that the big ring was the natural call. Amazingly I did almost the entire climb on the big ring. I’m sure Mat did ride it all the way.
I was thoroughly enjoying myself but also kept thinking that Mat’s friend who considered this the best road he’d ever ridden really needed to come back to France and ride in the Alps. I mean I was enjoying the views but it wasn’t like they were screaming at me to stop and shoot. Except for the hedges along the way, those I had to get some pictures of. Instead of just cutting back the shrubs along the road, the road department guys like to amuse themselves by trimming them back into shapes. Like the hidden artists in the road workers were let loose and told to do whatever they wanted. And they’d been doing it for a long time because these are slow growing shrubs. Achieving the almost surrealistic shapes they formed was the work of years of careful trimming. Made us smile the whole time we were riding by.
I kept wondering where the gorges were. All I saw was a broad, V-shaped valley steadily deepening and narrowing with occasional outcrops of limestone the road sliced across. Never did see a gorge. Finally came around a corner and spotted up ahead in the distance the road carved out of a cliff with a tunnel in the rock face. Ah ha, at last we get to what Mat’s friend had exclaimed about.
Three tunnels in all, the first short with just a fat pillar of rock out on a point defining the tunnel. The next two were a little longer and kind of just angled into massive buttresses of gray limestone then popped out the other side. And that was it, the road curved left and started a long glide down towards the village of Monieux. There was a small parking at the summit and a lookout point supported by rock walls with a view down into the gorge and back towards Mont Ventoux. Ventoux looked a long, long ways away. And getting to Sault meant continuing to ride away from the mountain. Looking at that distance made me glad that wasn’t where we were heading. Must be a huge loop.
I stopped, walked up onto the lookout, shot some pics, checked out the views, a pretty place, peaceful, still didn’t see what all the excitement was about. Mat’s friend really, really needs to ride some of the cliff roads in the Vercors and above Bourg d’Oisans. The big question now was do we turn around and discover just how fast a downhill going back must be, or forge ahead and do the loop. Huge temptation turning around because that has to be a fantastically fast return. But both of us like doing loops so forward it was, on to Monieux.
From the lookout to the village wasn’t far off flat, sometimes gentle up, sometimes gentle down, a wee bit more of the latter than the former. I’d told Mat I’d seen this little road that cut across the triangle formed by the road from Monieux to Sault and the road from Sault to Villes-sur-Auzon. Looked like it might even be a chemin, some forest road lazily angling up through the forest. No sign for it when we got to Monieux so we just took the first road up into the village and started looking for a fountain since all four of our bottles were dry by then. Small village, typically picturesque of south France, and mostly closed up. Got to the village square and a major surprise next to a prominent fountain gushing the fresh water we needed, a super attractive gourmet restaurant. Checked it out on the net after we got home and apparently it’s as good as it looked. I kept thinking where in the heck are the people coming from who eat here. I mean the village is small, like I doubt it could even support a bakery. The nearest town of any size at all is Sault, and I don’t think Sault is exactly a thriving metropolis. But here’s this fancy restaurant with the kind of prices you’d expect from a gourmet restaurant in a speck of a village out in the middle of nowhere. Kind of crazy.
We filled up bottles, headed off looking for our shortcut. Spotted it angling up the slope. Actually angling up doesn’t really tell the story. This puppy is steep, like double digits from the get-go. But at least it looked like it flattened out where it appeared to curve to the left so I just settled in and ground it out figuring I could bag a rolling rest at the top. Meanwhile Mat just flat attacked it. I got to where the road curved left and looked ahead. And yea, the pitch slacked off a bit, like maybe from mid double digits to low double digits. But only for a moment. Then it got steeper. I stopped and barely stayed upright.
This was a climb from hell. From the start of festivities to the end was just slightly over a K in length. I stopped five times in that K! And every time I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get started again. I was looking at having to for the first time ever get off my bike and push it up the hill. We’re talking desperate. But in the end I didn’t; I made it without walking. Barely. Mat would have ridden it non-stop but about halfway up he decided he’d maybe better stop and wait to see if I was still on the way because he sure as hell didn’t want to have to ride back down it and then ride up it again. So he stopped until he saw me coming up, slowly but surely. His Garmin showed grades in the high twenties. I think they were more like in the high thirties, minimum! So much for my forest road lazily wandering up the hillside. Amazingly, and thankfully, this beast was paved the whole way up. If it hadn’t been would have been a hike-a-bike for this pilgrim. One K, five stops, what more can I say. Some shortcut!
Mat was waiting for me at the top, the junction with the highway, and I just kind of rode right past him in a sort of dumb daze and continued up the road spinning the legs, letting the body slowly recover. Surprisingly didn’t take long. And with that we were off, wide road, wide shoulders, smooth blacktop, easy grades, cars flying by, the contrast couldn’t have been more blatant. A K plus later we were back on our kind of roads, narrow, rough, no shoulders, no lines, straight a foreign concept. Apparently it’s the old highway. The new highway instantly transformed it into a bike path, but still open to cars since I think we met one along the way. We were still climbing but so easily that there we were back on our big rings! Pretty crazy, really, from a wall of hell to cruiser city with zero transition.
I think we were carrying a pretty good pace across the hill but in truth don’t really remember. The riding was so easy we flying along and carrying on conversations at the same time. No idea what we were talking about. No doubt riding, probably my book that’s at the printer’s, stuff that popped into one mind or the other. Just rolling through a forest of pines on some hill in south France with occasional views of Mont Ventoux in the distance. Every time I saw it I was glad we were where we were instead on the mountain. This was pure fun, not some gladiator’s battle, with some ten K of high speed rolling on the big ring, small cog, the road jiggling and swerving, sometimes up, sometimes down.
After maybe ten K or so we crossed the highway we’d been on briefly earlier. The crossing was the only smooth pavement we’d seen since we turned off the highway. Then back onto our bumpy, nervous, sometimes gravely pseudo bike path in the woods. Maybe a K and a half later we discovered the surprise of the day, maybe even the surprise of our trip south in fact. Popped out of the trees, curled around a hard turn to the left, and the road dove down the hillside. Instant acceleration, gravity pulling hard. An eight K descent, average grade just under 6% or so. Rode steeper because the road kept diving into these round turns that almost every time spilled out into a flat or even a small climb. What was really wild here was that I think everyone of these turns was banked like they were made for fast moving bikes. I’d come into them carrying a load of speed with a finger floating over each brake lever ready to shed some speed and just about every single time I didn’t brake. Couple of times, maybe more, I felt like I was right on the edge for speed and wondering if maybe shedding a little wouldn’t be a good idea but every time the speed and the arc blended together just right. No idea what kind of speeds we hit, other than faster than I could spin a 50/12 combo.
Kicking up the excitement factor was a road surface bucking and jiggling around with strips and patches of gravel and sand in lots of the turns. And every time we raised our eyes off the road for an instant, there was the Ventoux soaring up into a blue sky. Not that we looked very often, no way, this was one descent that demanded our complete attention all the way down. I loved it, so did Mat. This may seem a sacrilege but for me the plunge off Ventoux pales compared to this puppy. I mean dropping off Ventoux is just about pointing the bike down and holding on. Grades are steep so it’s automatically fast but most of the time the road’s pretty straight or the turns are long, drawn out affairs like up on the upper slopes. This little back road to Flassan was technically demanding, had a sweet rhythm of longer turns mixed with tight curves and all of them round and smooth, the arc, not the road surface. Plus the tighter turns were friggin banked with the exit a flowing increasing radius arc. Could have kept going for twice as long as far as I was concerned but still, some 450 meters of drop wasn’t too bad.
We flashed through Flassan, hit the road back to Ste Colombe and back into the vineyards and cherry trees in full bloom. I was thinking back to the hotel would be a slow uphill given the speeds we hit coming down. I think I rode it all on my big ring; I’m sure Mat did. A sweet ending to a fine day. Gorges de la Nesque, a good ride, wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it anyone who’s in the area but I don’t think I’d make a special trip to ride it. Then again that descent to Flassan, oh la, wouldn’t mind doing a repeat of that. Holy smokes is that ever fun!
Bikes on the roof, back to the Alps, Mat’s third day here, and in three days the big ride, my traditional anniversary ride. I usually do that alone, just works out like that. But not this year, this year I’m celebrating big time, turning 70, riding with Mat, Maxn, and another young friend and I’ve got maybe a humdinger of a ride planned for the day. A four col tour with col number three a complete unknown with the potential for some sweet surprises, or maybe some rude surprises. And my legs are toast! Could be interesting.
Some pics. Cheers