The late summer light makes for unique colors at this time of year. Under a steel-blue sky, lush green patches of mountain forests alternate with meadows and brambles in all shades of brown on the colossal mountain flanks. The walls and rock towers in between shine brightly in the sunlight and the air is almost as clear as in winter. On small hills and along the rivers, crooked and angled stone houses huddle together to form hamlets or small villages.
The Pic du Montbrison
As we set off from les Vigneaux in the morning, there is still a haze over the small river Gyronde, a tributary of the Durance, and it is very cold. Today we want to cycle around the Pic du Montbrison and explore the area west of the Val Durance. Although the route is only just under thirty-seven kilometers, we have planned a whole day for the tour as there are almost seventeen hundred metres of altitude to conquer - and didn't Stefan also say something about a longer carrying passage?
After a steep ascent, the route follows the GR 50, which runs through the entire Haut Dauphiné, on a wide slope for several kilometers. Through larches and spruces, you can always catch a glimpse of the valley and the small, picturesque settlements on the opposite slope. When we have almost reached the tree line, we turn off into a high valley. Cows graze on sunlit mountain pastures. The lazy ringing of bells can only be heard in a muffled voice, mingling with the buzzing of bees and the gurgling of an invisible meadow stream. High mountain idyll in perfection - except that the path now becomes steeper and steeper and you can only see the next few meters of gravel in front of your front wheel. But that ends at a small mountain pasture, because the path ends here. "We have to cross the saddle back there", announces Stefan, pointing vaguely to the green mountain flanks in front of us, which still stretch quite far back and, above all, upwards. "You can't see that from here yet, but you certainly can from the next plateau. We just follow the cairns for three quarters of an hour and there's still a bit of riding to be done," says Sichts, shouldering his bike and trudging up the steep slope in front of us. "There's an amazing descent from there. I promise!" he calls back as he sees us grasping our bikes skeptically. It is indeed possible to tackle one or two passages in the saddle, but we are usually so out of breath from the carrying and climbing passages that we can't really talk about "enjoyable cycling". On the other hand, the landscape is breathtakingly beautiful and, in the light of dark clouds and bright late summer sun, looks like a Caspar David Friedrich-style mountain romance painting.
Good?, better?, let's forget the superlatives?
After an hour and a half, we finally reach the saddle and a view opens up that tops everything we've seen so far and could have come straight from the film set of the last "Lord of the Rings"episode. You feel like you're looking directly at Mordor - albeit in good weather. There is a little too much of everything here for it to seem real: too much light, too much color, too big mountains, too great a view. The mountain ranges of the Dauphine stagger to the west like jagged sliding backdrops in ever brighter shades of blue. Blue haze fills the deeply carved valleys all around and makes the brown and red mountain grass strips between the scree slopes on the steep slope glow
This arrangement of mountain and mountain bike clichés, which already seems completely exaggerated, is completed by the deeply incised single trail that crosses into the depths in long traverses. Unfortunately, the following descent over more than fifteen hundred meters of altitude in the golden evening light cannot be described without falling into an even worse swarm of clichés and superlatives. So we'll just leave them out and offer the following final image instead: an apple orchard with a brick irrigation channel along which a small clay path runs. A couple of mountain bikers roll along with broad grins on a balmy summer evening. Their forearms and fingers are a little cramped from all the braking, but their pulse gradually calms down again and their adrenaline levels are no longer high. A few small clouds of dust swirl up as we take the last two steps back onto the tarred road. The sign in front of an inn by the river announces "Menu du jour: 15.50 euros" and you can hear the quiet squeal of disc brakes. Then it's quiet.
Text: Jan Sallawitz
