If you missed day 2 click here:
Tour du Mont Blanc - Day 2
It was a really good feeling, waking up ready to ride on day 3. The only bad thing was that we had a long, long way to go before we were back on our original schedule. We rode down on the pavement from Refugio Elena to Courmayeur. At this point we were essentially directly opposite from Chamonix with Mont Blanc between us and home. After getting a little lost in Courmayeur we managed to find the road to Val Veny. At this point we began the longest climb of the whole journey. From Courmayeur to the Col de la Seigne is an elevation gain of 1390m (4560 ft)! At around noon we passed the Refugio Elizabetta, meaning we were only 3 hours behind our original schedule. Upon reaching the Col de la Seigne, and the border between Italy and France, we were looking forward to what many people had described as the best descent of the whole journey. The descent did not disappoint. Sometimes technical and tough, sometimes fast and flowy, the ride had everything. We flew down to the town of Les Chapieux and had a quick lunch. Next we left the hiking route of the TMB because it is too steep for bikes and began the climb to the Cormet de Roselend. Although the climb is entirely on paved
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| Col de la Seigne, border between Italy and France |
road it is still cool because the climb has been featured in many years of the Tour de France. I think Bucky climbed the thing as fast as the tour riders do, even on a mountain bike. Every time I looked up he was further down the road and I was getting more and more drenched in sweat! From the Cormet de Roselend it was a fast descent down the road to Lac de Roselend, where we hoped to find a market to replenish our snacks and water. We were very sorry to find that we could not replenish our snacks, but we ended up having a second lunch at a small cafe and at least getting our water refilled. The next section, from Lac de Roselend to the Col du Gittaz looked very daunting on the map. The topo lines are so close together through this section I thought for sure we were going to be hiking the whole thing. At this point we had already been riding for 7 hours and we only had three hours to make it to Le Gorge de Notre Dame, the location of our refuge, before they served dinner. We also had three passes and about 1300m (4265 ft) of climbing to go! We made it up over the first pass and found our path blocked by a large herd of cattle lining up to get milked. We had to pass over a series of electrically charged fences (without getting shocked, thank God) and continued on our way. As we descended to the Lac de la Gittaz we could see the road that we were supposed to end up on, and it seemed the trail we were on was heading in the opposite direction. I climbed up a side path to peek over a knoll and see if the trail we were on doubled back around or if we had taken a wrong turn somewhere. Upon finding that we were indeed headed in the right direction I attempted to ride down the very steep hillside back to the trail. I was nearly successful, but ended up endo'ing near the bottom and landed with my head on a rock and my shoulder in a cow pie. Besides the smell I had only suffered some small cuts and bruises so I continued riding without thinking much about it. We began the climb up to the Col du Gittaz and found that the road had a lot more switchbacks than were shown on the map, so even though it was quite steep, it was all rideable. I managed to ignore the pain I was in by imagining myself in a hot tub, in February, in Vail, with a bottle of rye whiskey, some beer, and a beautiful woman. Somehow that managed to get me through the arduous slog.
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| Lucky Cows |
I awoke from my reverie near the top to find that the road ended and we had to hike our bikes up a trail that seemed to have been used exclusively by cattle for time unending. Upon passing some of said cattle, Bucky quiped, "You don't know how lucky you have it cows, you could be living in Nebraska!" Instead they were living in a place that could only remind someone of
The Sound of Music. At the top of the Col du Gittaz Bucky looked at me and said, "Was your helmet always cracked?"
"No." I said. "Well it is now!" I certainly wasn't concussed at all by the little spill I took, but apparently my helmet is not quite as hard as my head. Anyway, from the Col du Gittaz we had a short but very fun descent (I thought the best of the journey, Bucky voted for the Col de la Seigne) before we started climbing again to the Col du Joly. Luckily this was a very short (2km, 100m) climb and we arrived at the top at about 7:15pm. At the top of the Col du Joly we entered the boundary of Les Contamines Montjoie ski area and found an extremely fun downhill MTB specific trail to take us all the way in to town. We made our way to the refuge at 7:40pm after 11:10 hours of biking, but we had made up all of the time we had lost by the broken bike shenanigans on days 1 and 2! The next best part was that the refuge didn't hold to the serving dinner at 7:00pm sharp rule so we were even able to eat!
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