Higher Calling
Page 4
Somewhere under there is a road. They’d traced it successfully over the top and around the cirque. The question is, where is it now?
Didier scrambles up into the driving seat of another wheel loader, and Aurelien gets into the snowblower – a Mercedes Unimog truck with a metre-high roller mounted across the front, and above that two curved, swivelling chimneys that lend it something of the look of a giant beetle with protruding antennae. The rotating drum is powered by an 11-litre turbo diesel engine that sits on the flatbed behind the cab. As it spins, the grooved surface chews into the snow, which is inhaled and then spat out in a plume in whichever direction the chimneys are pointing. Aurelien invites me to sit in the passenger seat, a dirty, metal-framed contraption surrounded by oily levers and gauges. He starts engine number one, then engine number two, and the snowblower belches out smoke from its snorkel exhausts – even engines lack oxygen up here and spit black fumes because of the half-combusted diesel. Then he engages first gear and we roll towards the snow bank where the road ends. The MO is that Aurelien’s fraise (as the French call the machine, which for some reason is the same word as ‘strawberry’) cuts a first passage through the snow, exactly the rolling drum’s width, and then Didier in the loader comes along behind to dig down to the asphalt, and clean it up and widen it until there is something you could, more or less, cycle along. It’s not very scientific, and questions present themselves to me almost immediately
One: even with the snow poles, how do you know where to go? The markers we can see poking upwards are positioned on the downhill edge of the road, and the idea seems to be that you aim just above the poles and hope for the best. The rest of it is down to memory (of the landscape and roadway in summer) and, well, luck. ‘Better to be too high than too low,’ Aurelien tells me, and his understatement is not lost. The second is Newtonian: how do you stop the Unimog from just tumbling sideways? Gravitationally speaking, that seems far and away the most likely outcome of all this hoo-ha. In other parts of France the fraises have caterpillar tracks, which are more sure-footed and stable in deep snow. Indeed, they did here too until quite recently, but there are relatively few roads this far south that benefit from it, and wheeled vehicles can be used elsewhere in better conditions, so a €300,000 investment is difficult to justify. Very quickly our Unimog, sallying forth on a bed of snow of unknown depth and constitution, seems right on the edge of tipping over to the left and into the depths of the valley below. I find myself bracing against the seat frame and leaning hard right, like a bubble in a spirit level bobbing upwards, as the horizontal underneath me see-saws left. Although he seems to be controlling the juddering, jolting machine with little more than gritted teeth and determination, Aurelien does not appear worried. He steers into the cool snow wall on the uphill side, and hopes the snow chains will bite. There are controls to keep the rolling drum level, thus creating a horizontal track for us to follow, and that’s really all we can do: cut a level path and stay above the road.
Another problem quickly becomes apparent. The snowblower can only deal with about 1.5 metres of drift, so if the snow is deeper, the snowblower must be lifted from the roadway where it is parked up to a height where the snow will not simply overwhelm the drum, fall into the blowers and get backed up. When this happens, Aurelien stops the engine, gets out and stands on the bonnet to dig both chimneys clear with a shovel. We attempt to begin again, but the wall is just too high and we are stuck, unable to move forward or backwards, staring through the Unimog’s windows at a blank wall of snow on two sides. Aurelien gets out – this time through a roof hatch, as we are boxed in by snow and his door will not open – and unhooks one end of the tow chain from the back, walks over to Didier’s loader, attaches it, gets back in. The gigantic digger takes up the slack and, barely straining, jerks us out. I reach out of the window and grab some snow from the vertical wall sliding past, and eat it.
The difficulty, Aurelien explains, was that the slope up to cutting position was too steep. We couldn’t get high enough to get going, and we chat as we wait for Didier to landscape us a new ramp up. It’s Aurelien’s first full year as a member of the snow-clearing crew, but he’s a mountain man through and through, having moved from his native Pyrenees to this valley of the southern Alps to be with his wife, whose family have a restaurant in one of the ski resorts. In the summer he works as a builder, and part time with the roads department, maintaining bridges and retaining walls, and mowing. ‘Lots of mowing,’ he says wearily. In the Pyrenees he’d also done what he calls acrobatic building work – abseiling down dams and cliffs, laying irrigation pipes for shepherds, that sort of thing – and I can see that trimming brambles is an anticlimax after any of that. He explains the controls and the gear differentials, and the different types of snow (icy is better for snowblowers, slushy for loaders, powder for nobody at all, and there’s never a Goldilocks – ‘just right’ – situation); where to find the best mountain bike trails in the area and how the département is training up younger guys to clear snow on the mountains as a lot of the older guys are retiring.
While we wait, I climb up and out and take a wander around. In the UK, health and safety would be having kittens, but nobody here worries about sharing their ‘workplace’ with a city dweller who, though having frequently passed through on two wheels, proves himself embarrassingly inept at walking on the crusty snow above the road, and several times almost slips down the slope. It’s warm and sunny, and though the journey up was hairy, now we’re here, under a big sky and an almost 360° view of peaks, there is a meditative tranquillity, only broken by the tinkling of snow chains as Didier trundles back and forth. Surrounded by the sea of white, the possibility of a bicycle race passing here in five weeks – five weeks – seems very remote. Finally, the snow slope that Didier has fashioned is ready. Aurelien advances and we ride up, tip backwards, backwards, and there is a precarious moment of teetering, like a rollercoaster at the zenith of its climb, with the entire windscreen full of blank blue sky sliding up and away. Then we tip forward, the cutting motor engages, the drum bites and fountains of white crystals stream from the two chimneys and we are biting, chewing, spitting, motoring on our way again.
It’s not fast. One engine pushes us forward into the wall, the other scoops the wall away so we can advance. The whole shebang vibrates and shivers, the wheels slip, snow chains grip, and centimetre by centimetre we carve a channel. Behind us is Didier. He is a metre or more below us, just about uncovering the road on which they will be racing in five weeks’ time, and he is demolishing the false floor we have created, scooping it up and tipping it over the side, then reversing and starting anew, advancing in a two-steps-forward-one-step-backwards Y formation. If Didier strays too far from the median he starts scraping at the dirt verge, pushing streaks of brown mud through the white, and he has to be vigilant: as the loader pushes snow sideways and off the edge, he is in danger of creating a snow platform, a false impression of flat ground where there isn’t any. Even at this stage it’s guesswork as to where the tarmac actually is, but with a bit of trial and error, the black emerges from underneath its white coat. With each tip of the loader’s bucket, snow chunks the size of white goods – kitchen appliances, I mean – roll down the mountain and, contrary to popular belief, do not snowball and gather more weight, but instead eventually break up and explode into a million tiny snowflakes. Or they slow and sit in large, dirty chunks as a reminder of the heavy lifting that has cleared this road for cyclists.
We chug along for a hundred metres, maybe more, and then Aurelien shuts the engine off. It is a truism that at one o’clock each day half of France stops working and is served food by the other half, but it’s also a valid insight into the national character. And the only difference that working since 7 a.m., being 25 kilometres up a mountain and surrounded by avalanches makes is that this great national pause happens a bit earlier. We get back in the car and drive up to the portacabin. Before eating, Didier puts the water on the stove to start its slow transform
ation into coffee for afters, and everyone compares notes on the morning. Not quite everyone. Bernard is not there. Why not, I ask. We can see his machine from afar, engine still running, but not moving or engaged in much work. In the distance, down the road, a solitary figure moves towards us, lean and rangy on a bike, navigating between the rocks and the ice patches on deep carbon rims. Decidedly, it is not Bernard. The man arrives at the portacabin and shakes Aurelien’s hand. He’s a local, a physiotherapist from Saint Étienne de Tinée at the foot of the mountain, and he clearly knows his way around it. In fact, he says, it’s his fourth ride up this year. Last year he made it up 59 times – but he’s in competition with a friend who beat him, with 60, so a few reps before the road is officially open is standing him in good stead. He hopes. Why do it, I ask, why this one? ‘It’s the most beautiful road in the Alps,’ he says.
The physio also brings news of Bernard. Bernard was, as he rode past, sleeping in the cab of his loader. No lunch for Bernard. Just sweet oblivion in front of one of the best office views in the world. As for me, I have done no work whatsoever, but I am starving. I savour that irony keenly as I savour the taste of my Pret A Manger avocado sandwich. (This obviously compounds and multiplies said irony by a million, though in my defence, given the late nights and early starts, Gatwick Airport was the only viable option for me to buy the day’s lunch.)
The afternoon’s work passes quickly. Now we are in position we chug forward steadily and meet no more problems. The drop becomes less steep and the transverse cut of the road across the gradient less deep, and so less snow blocks our path. As the snowblower and the loader perform their synchronised dance the newly cut tarmac behind them becomes a slushy trickle and then a rushing stream. All too quickly, it seems, the noise and the shuddering stop, and Aurelien is hitching the snowblower to the loader and we are being pulled back down to earth. It’s barely a quarter to three, but the machines have to be brushed down and refilled with diesel, and then it’s almost an hour back down to the depot. It’s not just the French functionaries’ love of a short working day that’s taking us down now: the afternoon heat brings softening snow, and with that come avalanches. Nobody here has ever been killed in one, and they employ geologists to survey the work when the risks are highest, but it’s important to get out when the going is good.
Right at this moment Jean-Marie arrives, slaloming with insouciance down the stream in a two-wheel-drive hatchback. He is wearing a polo shirt, open at the collar, and cowboy boots and Ray-Ban Aviators, not sports sunglasses. He surveys the work done, approves, gazes out over the unbroken white below. ‘We’ll be at the barracks by Friday,’ he says, gesturing expansively towards the top of a long stone wall a few hundred metres distant, the remains of the large, squat Caserne de Restefond, the barracks that guarded the pass in the 19th century. Even though it’s in plain view, the road serpents gently around the contours of the mountain so it’s still a fair way off, but Jean-Marie can see far past it, down the hill to where the air is warm and the snow peters out, to where his crews will make the junction with the tarmac of the northern side; at which point they will take their machines back up and drive down in the Citroën to Jausiers, where the mayor will buy them all dinner. ‘Opening this col, it’s magic, you know,’ he says.
There may well be more snowfall. But once the channel is cut the battle is won, and teams will just keep on going. ‘We had 40 centimetres of fresh snow two days ago, and look at it now,’ he says jubilantly, gesturing at the streams of meltwater glistening in the sun, wearing away at the snow walls by the side of the road. The only potential problem would be a big storm on the day of the stage itself, which would leave no time for clearing the road anew. And so, for Jean-Marie, the stage is set. Even the Lombarde (the Giro’s other major climb in his jurisdiction, which is narrow and tricky in its upper reaches) will be ready. ‘Our side will be OK,’ says Serge, Jean-Marie’s deputy, indicating that their snowblowers and ploughs will only attend to the road this side of the French–Italian border. ‘The other side is their business.’
And, with that, we shake hands and they’re gone, securing the barrier behind them so that we can enjoy the end of the afternoon alone. For my friends who came along for the ride (and who brought their bikes), it is time to realise that dream of cycling along an empty route barrée, the road winding between banks of snow like newly discovered buried treasure.
I, without a bike, am left with some time to think. Let’s say we advanced 250 metres today and cut a 3-metre wide channel with an average depth of 2.5 metres. Light powdery snow weighs (so Google now tells me) around 5–7 pounds per cubic foot. Let’s take six as a good figure, which makes it around 210 pounds or around 95 kilos per cubic metre. The loader’s bucket has a volume of four cubic metres, which means that each of those overflowing loads tipped down the side of the mountain weighed approximately 400 kilos. So, at a rough guess, that means 1,875 cubic metres of snow in total, weighing around 178 tons, was cleared today alone. Can that really be right? The mind boggles at the effort put in so that we cyclists, walkers, mountain lovers, can indulge our passion and share these wild, remote places, these roads on which cycling legends were built and now exist almost solely for us.
I walk back up to the top and surprise two walkers in the loader’s bucket, which is nicely bathed in the setting sun and affords a marvellous view … and privacy. They have laid out a camping mat within and appear to be preparing to have sex, and there is a good chance that this is – would have been – the highest sex in Europe; but clearly, with my arrival, the moment passes and they corral their two dogs and clear off.
So I sit, instead, alone, and watch the light soften, turning the snow on the distant mountains a delicate buttery gold. I think back to Aurelien: he was a mountain lover too, just like us. Why did he keep coming back, I asked. Exploring, he said – and though the answer was not surprising I was somehow surprised that someone so at home in the bright thin air was motivated by the same impulses as the rest of us, or that he found anything here left to explore. He was a skier and a mountain biker and a climber (and had a fat bike to ride in the snow), but he did a bit of road riding as well. Every year, he said, he would set off with a couple of friends on their road bikes over the Bonette down to Jausiers, then over the Col de Larche into Italy and back to the start via the Col de la Lombarde – a loop of three 2,000-metre-plus cols that would make a formidable Grand Tour stage and a grand day out for anyone else.
I asked him if, when he passed over the Bonette on a road bike in the summer, he felt proud of the work he’d done, and proud that he was responsible for giving us this experience. ‘Yes, when there’s still snow around,’ he said. ‘But when it’s all gone people don’t understand.’ He continued: ‘It’s like the snow was never there. And then you have to start all over again the next year.’
It’s a funny kind of work, then.
Hard and physical and with a certain pleasure, but ultimately intangible, ephemeral, a bit like cycling up a mountain itself.
Chapter 2
HORS CATÉGORIE
Or, how we attempted to drive a Citroën 2CV up the Bonette, followed a brave adventurer into a crevasse and neither proved nor disproved how the high mountains came to the Tour de France
For reasons that, looking back on it, I am not now adequately able to explain, my friend Rémi and I once tried to drive a Citroën 2CV to the top of the Col de la Bonette. Or rather, I can still discern our motivations but, in hindsight, they seem threadbare and unable to justify such a bizarre undertaking.
To say that we were both at a moment in our lives in which piloting an old, underpowered car up a mountain made sense was true, and not even simply a metaphor. Some days before I had finished a period working as a journalist in France, and thanks to an extended amount of time away from home and long sojourns in the mountains I found myself without anchor or goal. My only aim was to enjoy the warm light and soft colours of the Riviera autumn, since heading back to England would be to admit
that summer was over and to concede defeat for another year. Thus, in the 2CV escapade, I had no defined role: I was simply joining in for the ride, wherever that might take us. As for Rémi, he was head of a company in Nice that made cycling apparel – bib shorts, jerseys and the like – with a twist of French style; he needed to shoot his winter collection, and reasoned that only by getting high, high above the sparkling blue sea (still warm enough to swim in) would he find the weather to suit his clothes. However, aside from his professional obligations, I suspected he had private reasons for embarking on this strange mission: we were both perhaps open to something reckless and futile, which might fail, or even, somehow, obscurely succeed only in its own failure.
In England – where there has to be a product – they ask: ‘Is it for charity?’ In Flanders, Italy, Spain or rural France, where lunacy is celebrated, they say: ‘What beautiful madness!’fn1
I was all in for some beautiful madness. Whether you’re the legendary climber Rheinhold Messner, two men in a 2CV or simply an average Joe on a bike, climbing a mountain always contains something of it, and the motivations that push you to climb are rarely sufficient to rationally explain the endeavour.
Rémi had decided that a 2CV, that quintessential Gallic motor, should be enlisted to add character to the photo shoot, and also as a platform from which the photographer might shoot. But there was of course only one way to get it up there: driving. The rest of the crew and the models were already in the mountains, so it was only Rémi and I who collected the car. The man who rented it to us kept a garage full of the bug-eyed Citroëns, on a street outside central Nice whose steepness seemed to me at least a minor reassurance that the nags in his stable were up to the job. He was interested that we were doing a photo shoot in the backcountry, and even gave us a magnetic sign advertising his business to place on the car door at an opportune moment. Frankly, being a mobile billboard was not in our game plan; neither was telling him that we would be pointing his antique up the highest road in Europe. And, more importantly, driving it safely back down again too. We did not feel we could fully disclose to him our plans for fear that he would take fright and forbid us from taking it on to those high distant roads of sharp turns flanked by crevasses, dangers that surely might provoke cheap and geriatric car parts to fail catastrophically.