Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  But even this ‘highest road’ is problematic. It’s only the highest inter-valley road if you ignore the fact that the Cime’s start and end are within metres of each other, across a narrow ridge above a perfectly usable col, and that the loop is therefore completely pointless. It is a ‘long-cut’ built simply for the glory, a treacherous circle of tourist road, two kilometres long, with steep drops and 15 per cent gradients on all sides.

  I wouldn’t, however, bother expending much energy debating the case. Ever tried arguing with the French? It’s a losing game. And besides, the factoid is announced on signposts everywhere, and written in books and everything. The French are nothing if not masters of branding. In fact – think Bordeaux, think Champagne, think Camembert, hell, think cycling itself – they practically invented branding. So Bonette may not be the highest paved road, but since they’ve said it is so, that’s what it’s known as.

  Approached from the villages of Jausiers to the north and Saint Étienne de Tinée to the south, it’s a beautiful, fairly regular climb of around 25 kilometres. In summer, above Bousiéyas, that last outpost of civilisation, shepherds wander the pastures with their flocks in the time-honoured way of the transhumances, while even further up the deserted barracks still forlornly survey the landscape. Like all the very highest roads in the Alps, the climb seems to take you from one landscape to another, one season and one mood to another, as you ascend from valley to ridge and into valley again, up until there are no more valleys, to where all earthly lines converge at the peak. You can be in 30°C summer at the bottom and by the top be surrounded by stormy winter, or start off in a heavy mood and 25 kilometres later have been lifted out of it – having, thanks to the twin analgesics of the scenery and hard physical work, left your troubles on the road far behind.

  There may be longer climbs elsewhere, and ones more brutal, and ones with more Tour de France history, but this is the highest point ever to have been ridden in a Grand Tour, and it is really something to be able to say I have ridden up the highest road in Europe (and show pictures of the signposts that prove it).

  However, none of this works without a road.

  The journey to the blue portacabin started at sparrow’s-fart o’clock on Wednesday 20 April in Saint Étienne. The previous Friday, the road-clearing crew had reached and passed the col in their machines, and they were already engaged on the descent. We had travelled from Nice in the dead of night to catch them before their drive up the mountain and I was keen to know why they were so far along so early in the year. The first of the crew to arrive, Bernard, was no help. He was unsure of who we were, how the work was progressing, what would be happening for the rest of the day, or, equally possibly it seemed, how he had arrived at that place, at that time, why he was not in his bed. He seemed cheerful about it all, however, and in that moment, fresh from a late flight from the UK, a 4 a.m. alarm bell and two shots of bad black coffee, I envied him his eternal present and the equanimity – nay, dry humour – with which he was able to confront all things that crossed his path.

  Aurelien arrived on a mountain bike, then Didier, and then Éric, and the situation became clearer: it was because of the Giro d’Italia.

  By lucky coincidence (both for my snowblowing visit and, it would turn out, this whole book), it had been announced only a week before my visit to Jean-Marie that the 2016 Giro would be passing over the Col de la Bonette. It was the first time the Giro was to cross the Bonette, and it was to take place on 28 May, the penultimate stage before the grand finale in Turin. The race would enter France the day before, and having overnighted in Risoul to the north, would climb the 2,111-metre Col de Vars before attacking the 24-kilometre climb of the Bonette from Jausiers. Then it would head down the other side and take a left turn at Isola, where the riders would face another 20 kilometres or so of uphill – through Isola 2000, a ski resort, and over the 2,350-metre Col de la Lombarde. There, it would re-enter its homeland and continue via a short, technical descent and a steep uphill to the finish line at the holy shrine of Sant’Anna di Vinadio.

  That opened up some interesting prospects.

  Most excitingly, it might very well happen that these French climbs – the Vars, the Bonette and the Lombarde – would prove decisive in the battle for the overall leader’s pink jersey (the maglia rosa) or the mountains classification jersey (currently a very Italian shade of blue). Equally, they might very well not. It was also totally possible that the Italian favourite, Vincenzo ‘The Shark’ Nibali, or another contender could have built an unassailable lead in the nineteen stages before then. However, given that the Giro’s last day is traditionally just a celebratory procession (and in this particular edition’s case, almost all downhill), the Bonette stage would be the last chance for any real racing. This would be the last place any of the climbers would be able to show themselves or make their mark on the race. I could already imagine hordes of thin-limbed cyclists hurling themselves in a sort of reverse-lemming manoeuvre at the flanks of these formidable mountains in a kamikaze final lunge for glory, victory or self-immolation on the bonfire of best-laid plans and dashed hopes. Either way, it was certain that my favourite corner of the Alps, one that seemed often criminally overlooked by the big races, would be the scene of a right rip-roaring Grand Tour battle.

  Or was it?

  The thing about the Giro is that the weather can be, well, interesting. Italy is a long, thin place, and while the south can be sweltering, even in May, the north can offer an entirely different climate. One of the reasons sometimes proffered for why the Tour de France is a bigger and more prestigious race than the Giro (aside from its seniority and that branding thing the French do) is that the Tour de France occupies a prime position in July. There is a logic to this: people are on holiday, the sun is reliably shining almost everywhere in France, and consequently the race has a laissez-passer to go anywhere: the highest, most picturesque climbs and the most breathtaking roads in France. The whole thing screams summer and good times. The Giro’s position in May makes all that less certain, and the race has often famously run into difficulties in the high mountains. Think, for example, of the celebrated pictures of Andy Hampsten climbing the Passo di Gavia in a blizzard in 1988. That year, in preparation for the stage, the 7-Eleven team riders covered themselves from head to foot in lanolin and team soigneurs raided the local ski shops to keep their riders warm.fn1 Or, more recently, the Passo dello Stelvio, the Giro’s iconic climb close to the Gavia in the Ortler Alps: in 2014 it was the scene of some confusion when, in a freezing, dank near-whiteout, the racing on Stelvio’s long, looped-spaghetti descent was neutralised, on safety grounds. And then it wasn’t. Or maybe it was. Whatever the race orders (it is still not 100 per cent clear what actually happened), the Colombian Nairo Quintana raced down the hill regardless, winning the stage and putting himself in the maglia rosa – which he would eventually win.

  You’ve spotted the flaw in this line of thinking, haven’t you. The Bonette is clearly not in Italy. It is very near Italy, yes, but it’s also pretty near the Côte d’Azur and should be more blessed by sun than the Italian Alps to the east, where the climate is much more Mitteleuropean. Nevertheless, the basic point remains. Any high European climb can be hit by bad weather in any season (I took a drive up the Stelvio once, in mid-August, and looked pretty silly wandering around in espadrilles in the few centimetres of snow at the top) and there is always an element of playing chicken with the forecasts. But the bottom line is, taking a race over 2,000 metres in May is definitely a more risky business than in July, and the 2016 Giro wasn’t planning to do it just once, but 10 times. (By contrast, the always-more-conservative Tour was programming four 2,000-metre-plus highs in 2016.)

  We’ll leave the question of ‘why go so high?’ until a bit later: for now, let’s just concentrate on the final two climbs, the Bonette and the Lombarde, which were the ones on Jean-Marie Fabron’s turf. The decision to include them was surely the result of a detailed feasibility study, risk assessment, long consulta
tion with stakeholders and serious high-level debate. Non?

  ‘I’ve no idea whose initiative it was … So far I’ve only heard about it in the newspaper,’ Jean-Marie told me that day we met.

  Oh. Right.

  Bonette can suffer serious snowfall and is not reliably open until May, so the decision not to consult the man in charge seemed, from the vantage point of his office at least, slightly flawed. The previous winter there hadn’t been much snow, so the road had opened on 11 May. The year before that, however, had been a snowy one, and it hadn’t happened until 31 May.

  ‘In May, we’re not certain of having made the link. I … Listen. If the Giro comes through, that’s great. Great for the valley and for everyone. But nevertheless, there’s two cols to open, the Lombarde and the Bonette. When that’s done, it could very well come through. But so far, nobody’s asked my advice, whatever that is, on any of it.’

  Jean-Marie was a little miffed. The mention of the Giro was the only time in our conversation that he seemed discomfited, not king of his castle. Miffed, but was he worried? No: ‘Let’s be clear: we’ve got what we need, we know what we’re doing. It’ll be a great experience for the valley, for the col. It’s a great advert. I’m very happy, proud even.’

  The Giro has never been over the Bonette before, but the Tour de France has taken it on four times, in 1962, 1964, 1993 and, most recently, 2008. Jean-Marie had been in charge for that one – a memorable Tour stage where the race passed over the Cime and the first man over, South African Barloworld rider John-Lee Augustyn, overshot a corner on the descent and tumbled down the mountain. Remarkably, Augustyn was OK, and even managed to finish the stage in 35th place, but for Jean-Marie there was more to regret that day: ‘For me that was a bit of a missed opportunity. The Tour de France is magnificent, but when you see it elsewhere it’s always so crowded, and here … I shouldn’t go on about it, and we’re in the middle of the Park, for sure, but I think that not everything was done to make people come, you know, and that’s a shame.’

  His phone begins to play a cha-cha-cha, which he ignores.

  ‘It’s clear that when people come there’s always cleaning up afterwards, but we could have organised that and shown off this mythical col to cycling fans. I hope that for the Giro there can be an agreement to accommodate people at the side of the road. We can sort out patrols … there will be cleaning to be done for sure.’

  The unspoken context of all of this is that the Bonette is in the middle of a national park, the Parc National du Mercantour. It’s one of the wildest and most deserted parts of Western Europe, complete with roaming packs of wolves, Bronze Age remains and vultures wheeling overhead. It had been implied to me more than once (when speaking to other people in the area and not, I should stress, Jean-Marie) that the park rangers would prefer nothing else happening in the park at all. No cars, no roads, no bicycles, no people, nothing – and that they were militant about getting their way. So this was Jean-Marie’s situation: he was a man. A man who loved a mountain. A man who loved a mountain and wanted to share it. A man who loved a mountain, with a big job to do. ‘It’s great that people can come to these mythical high cols to watch the riders pass. If not, what’s the use? All the interest is lost.’

  This is the backstory, then, to the accelerated schedule that Aurelien and gang are following – the pressure of the prospect of the passage of Italy’s greatest race – and we are driving in convoy behind their jaunty Citroën as the sky lightens above the black cliffs on either side of us. It’s a hell of a commute, up a road traversed by rivulets of meltwater that have refrozen overnight. A breakneck drive made safer by the more-or-less-certain knowledge that no vehicles will be coming down – though there may be newly fallen rocks, or large chamois or curly-horned ibexes around any corner, still sure that the mountain is theirs. We barrel past the tumbledown buildings of Le Pra with their rusty corrugated iron roofs, steam through Bousiéyas, and finally see banks of snow just below the Camp des Fourches, the roofless, abandoned collection of 19th-century huts that had once housed hundreds of soldiers defending the valleys against Italy. Two weeks ago, Didier explains, the drifts in this particularly gusty corner were up to six metres deep. ‘The wind takes it from some places and dumps it somewhere else,’ he says. Now, where it was six metres it is three, and where it was three it is only one. Once the snow’s mantle is broken and the road dug out, the newly uncovered blacktop absorbs the sun’s heat and accelerates the melting. This radiator effect is another good reason to get clearing early – the extra days will melt more snow, and make it safer and easier when race day arrives for the hoped-for multitudes of roadside spectators.

  Above us, now, all is white, and you can trace a line of disruption, like animal tracks, high on the mountainside kilometres ahead, a rumple and a ripple and a ruff of tumbledown snow boulders that show where the mechanical shovelling has taken place. It must be a very satisfying job, I think, mixing as it does public service and breathtaking surroundings, and something childlike with high doses of risk and testosterone. It is not abstract and modern, like human resources or social media, say, or management consultancy (all fine choices in themselves). Or much like writing, save for the fact that most days the only thing a writer can do is dig down into the white page on screen to find the black words below that will offer him or her a way forward.

  For the road-clearing crew there must be a tangible sense of achievement. We get in our machines and we move snow. We cut and we blow and we dig and we tip. Our progress is measured in metres advanced every day, and at the end we all sleep well because we’ve worked hard and we’ve helped. How many metres? Up to a kilometre on good days where there isn’t too much snow banked up, says Aurelien. On other days, progress into this pristine backcountry of chamois, marmots and wolves slows to a crawl. The view, magnificent in macro, monotone in micro, barely changes, and only rock ’n’ roll at full volume, through earbuds jammed into ear holes in an attempt to cut out the infernal racket of the machines, can make the time pass at a satisfactory pace.

  Around three kilometres from the top we reach a wooden barrier swung across the road. The cars stop. It is secured with a padlock and two large bolts, which Aurelien, who is weighed down with a large bunch of keys and a hefty socket wrench, undoes. He hefts it open, we pass through and he locks it again behind us, and even just doing this is ticking off a life goal, albeit a fairly minor one: riding past a ‘Road Closed’ sign is a primal thrill. These barriers exist on almost all the climbs that shut annually, and they’re padlocked open in summer, but which cyclist hasn’t ridden past them and thought fleetingly about the secret playgrounds that must, in the off-season, exist above? The private stretch of blacktop all to yourself, with no cars and no people, and just the sun and the wind and the snow all around … I am quickly disabused of this romanticism by Aurelien, who says the barriers aren’t generally needed in winter: the avalanche risks are so great that the roads are closed much further down, usually by placing a few signs and dumping a large pile of the white stuff right in the middle. Instead, they are mainly used in springtime, when the thaw has advanced and the road-clearing crews are working up top – both to stop unwelcome drivers and, it turns out, diesel thieves. There is enough slow-moving, thirsty machinery up there to need a smaller snowplough to service them; one which has sufficient diesel in the big tank behind the cab, apparently, to tempt thieves to drive up a steep, narrow, icy dead-end road in the cold black night to siphon it off. Good luck to you, boys, I think, and shudder inwardly.

  From here our path is increasingly covered with hard-packed, dirty ice and large rocks, which appear from under the moving Citroën without warning and force us to swerve. Sheer, high white walls rise up to three metres on either side, which in cross-section show the winter’s different snowfalls like geological ages or millefeuille pastry. With blue above and white all elsewhere, the shadows are an icy aquamarine, like driving through a Fox’s Glacier mint. Maybe a kilometre from the top our convoy stops by a d
ormant machine and Bernard gets out of the car, climbs into it and starts the engine. It is what any three-year-old might call a digger, with the tiny cab and oversized wheels and bucket of a child’s toy, but weighing multiple tons and on a gigantic scale. (Frankly, it’s what I would have called a digger too, though I have now learnt better and will call it a wheel loader.) Today, Bernard will be widening the channel and tidying the road we have just driven up, to make it perfectly passable. After the unnerving cannonball ascent, I find it reassuring that it will be in a better condition for our escape from the rapid chill of the high-altitude evening. We leave Bernard to it and then we’re there, at the top, at the portacabin, and the coffee’s on. And when that’s drunk and gaspers gasped we head out over the col to where the machines are waiting.

  Jean-Marie had promised to give me fair warning of progress, so I could visit for the most interesting bit of the work, and he hadn’t disappointed. It would be difficult to overestimate the amount of snow up here and, even though I am told that clearing downhill is easier than up, it looks like the team is tackling the hardest bit. The north side of the mountain gets less sun and the road, after sloping gently for about a kilometre around the cirque of the Restefond valley, plunges sharply. I know from my summer visits that this is a steep scree slope, but now it is just a smooth white blanket punctuated here and there by tall wooden poles, poking skywards.