Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  There is no map for what goes on inside your head.

  In 1984 the famously uncompromising mountaineer Rheinhold Messner journeyed into the Karakoram region of the Himalaya, to climb Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II. Messner had been one half of the duo (the other was Peter Habeler) that first scaled Everest without oxygen, and, if the new expedition was successful, he and his new partner Hans Kammerlander would become the first climbers ever to traverse between two 8,000-metre summits, carrying on their backs everything they needed to survive, and with no returning to a fixed camp in between. If they were unsuccessful, then the most likely outcome was freezing or starvation. Bitter, lonely deaths … which might have been part of what attracted the German filmmaker Werner Herzog to document their attempt in The Dark Glow of the Mountains. He followed the pair to base camp, and in the resulting film, as the camera pans across the shining peaks where their uncertain future lies, he ponders: ‘What goes on inside mountain climbers who undertake such extreme endeavours? What is the fascination that drives them up to the peaks like addicts? Aren’t these mountains and peaks like something deep down inside us all?’ Herzog disdained the ‘accountant’s truth’ – his description of the banal external realities of life – and dug into people’s psyches to reveal (sometimes made-up) ‘ecstatic’ truths. Hopefully, this book will uncover a few ecstatic truths of its own about the mental challenges we face – and seek – in the hills.

  How is that even possible (part I)? There’s no point honing the mind if the body is going to give up on you when the going gets tough, so next to psychology is physiology. One of the big draws of cycling in the mountains is the physical exertions it demands, and watching pro racers attack, up 10 per cent slopes and at altitudes where the air is thin, speeding in a way that normal riders would find tough on the flat, is an amazing and humbling sight. How do humans push themselves like this? What does it feel like, and what is actually happening when they do? But it’s not all about pros: physical training, effort, suffering, pain, are a huge part of everyone’s experience of road riding in the mountains, and, without going into ‘training manual’ territory, this book will explore the personal and emotional landscapes we encounter.

  How is that even possible (part II)? This might be the most neglected of all the strands. What is it that road cyclists wishing to ride in the mountains simply cannot do without? Mountains, yes; and bikes. But the real conundrum here is the roads. They seem like a road cyclist’s playground, like they were made for cyclists, even. Of course they were not – but what on earth are they doing up in these inhospitable, lonely places? Ribbons of tarmac that lead from nowhere special to nowhere else, whose tortuous routes are a mediation between some of humankind’s greatest civil engineers and the immense geological forces that millions of years ago created the topography the roads now climb. Yet if one considers that these forbidding peaks have for centuries formed a natural – yet contested – barrier between European nations, the roads begin to make more sense. Far from being remote and insignificant regions, the mountain ranges of the Alps are key strategic areas in the struggles that have shaped the continent. Napoleon, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Mussolini will all play a part in our story, though if we’re going back to first principles we could even look to Hannibal and his elephants (around 38 of which survived a march over the Alps in 218 BC). How does this relate to cycling? Simple: without this hidden history, the Alpine roads – and our sport as we know it – would not exist.

  But it’s more than geopolitics that have shaped human life in the mountains. You can ride past glaciers tumbling in supercooled slow motion, past abandoned refuges and watermills, or on roads overlooked by Second World War-era concrete bunkers on one side and 19th-century barracks on the other. Road cycling is not just competition, it’s exploration. It’s about seeing what’s around the corner, in the next valley along and in the one after that – or looking back into the past. After many years pedalling slowly uphill, I started to question what had shaped everything I saw. I got to thinking that if you do not appreciate what has created the views you see, the very ground beneath your feet, then you may as well be on an exercise bike in a gym.

  This part of the journey will range far and wide. Just as we’ll head behind the scenes of a Grand Tour, we’ll also go behind the scenes on a mountain, to listen to the stories told by mountaineers, shepherds, road workers and other mountain people (and cyclists), whose presence and work can, in the rush for the top, sometimes go unnoticed. We’ll search for what is unique to cycling in the mountains, but enrich that with their stories, since there is probably something in all of our experiences that is common, that will help us understand the mountain better. What does it take to live, work, ride among peaks … and what do we take from the mountains in return?

  If the big question I’m asking is ‘why’, then each chapter contains at least one ‘because …’, even if it’s not spelled out as such. One of the main characters I’ve enlisted to help is a young pro rider called Joe Dombrowski. He agreed to meet and chat, over the course of a year or more, and help me capture something of the life of a pro climber, the experience of training and racing in the mountains. For this I can’t thank him enough. The other main character is the Col de la Bonette, a mountain pass in southern France. Many of the rewards of being in the mountains are no doubt similar if you’re riding in Colorado, the Victorian Alps, the Atlas mountains or Montenegro, but much of what is particular to the history of cycle sport is distilled in the sweat spilt on the roads of the French and Italian Alps, so it made sense to me to remain there. There are plenty of climbs more famous than the Bonette, cycling-wise, but it is a place I knew well and kept returning to. It has the mystique of being the ‘highest road in Europe’ (which may not actually be true, as we’ll see), which draws cyclists like moths to a flame, and it also became important in so many other ways: I found drama and war in its history, beauty and struggle in its natural environment, and people there who helped me understand the mountain more deeply. So, while the cycling stories roam far and wide across the Alps and the Pyrenees, the book also became a portrait of one mountain, built up over several years of riding and visiting it. It is a worthy stand-in, I think, for the iconic mountains of the Grand Tours, and the stories I found there will, I hope, resonate widely. There are a few other writers in here too, and you’ll find a list of their books in the back pages of this one.

  I’ll be honest: I don’t have a ready answer to any of this (that old thing of ‘If I could tell you what this book was about, there wouldn’t be any point in writing it’). At some points I’ll be the White Rabbit leading you tumbling down the rabbit hole. But I hope there is enough common ground, bizarre adventures and amazing characters to carry all of us – those who ‘get it’ and those who don’t – through. This is the story of an obsession, or rather several: we’ll be travelling by the side of some mountain addicts, and some of the most remarkable sportspeople and explorers; across the world and back in time, to the earliest geological eras, the edges of civilisation and the cutting edge of scientific progress. The aim is to build an overall picture of the sensations, emotions, natural, physical and historical things, people and cultures you find in the mountains. If, by the end, we’ve clarified even something of what pushes people to ride their bikes in the mountains and keeps us coming back to see the wonderful things you can see there, then I’ll have succeeded.

  This is my whale. Call me Ishmael.

  Chapter 1

  SETTING THE STAGE

  Or, Jean-Marie’s feeling for snow and digging for the ‘highest paved road’ in Europe

  I am drinking a coffee made for me in a Ricard glass by a man called Didier, and we are higher than the sun. I would go so far as to say nobody drinking coffee in Europe is higher than us right now. It is just past eight o’clock in the morning and we are in a blue portacabin placed slap bang in the middle of a road near a mountain peak north of Nice. To the south the road slopes downhill all the way to the Mediterranean
Sea 115 kilometres away, and below us the surface is already warm in the morning light, but the asphalt here is covered by sheet ice. Behind us is a wall of snow some two or three metres high that – temporarily at least – forces a dead end, and to our left a narrow gap in the rocky ridge, where the road passes over the Col de la Bonette and down towards the Ubaye valley to the north.

  The sun, which is literally below us, has just appeared between two other peaks some miles off in the gentle remote air, and is broadcasting silver darts across all creation, save for where the still-proud snow dunes around us cast deep dark shadows.

  We are in a blue portacabin – HQ, lunchroom, sanctuary when the 100 km/h winds blow and the unpredictable blizzards come – emblazoned with fierce zebra stripes from the metal grilles at the windows, and Didier, a short man in sports sunglasses who in physical appearance owes much to both boulders and snowmen, is looking gnomic. On the picnic table in front of him are more Ricard glasses, Nestlé powdered instant coffee presented for our delectation in sugar-style sachets, and some actual sugar. He is leaning on a worktop with a small kitchen sink, and a gas bottle underneath it; to one side, a 25-litre plastic jerrycan half full with water, from which Didier earlier filled a saucepan to set on the stove for coffee.

  It had taken a long time to heat. We’re at 2,715 metres and although that means water will boil at lower temperatures (around 90°C at these heights), the altitude means the gas pressure is low and the stove’s flame weak. There is barely any air up here, and Didier’s colleague, Éric, is currently making sure there is less: he is slouched against the doorway watching, through sports sunglasses, the sheet ice melt at the bottom of the portacabin steps while he rolls a cigarette, one of many high-altitude gaspers he will smoke today.

  We are in a blue portacabin and Aurelien, a young man with a deep tan and an air of perpetual surprise thanks to the white circles around his eyes, the negative image of the sports sunglasses he habitually wears, is outside taking his work boots and an avalanche transceiver from the back of a Citroën Berlingo 4 × 4, which is decked out in the jaunty white and yellow livery of the local authority’s roads department. It is Wednesday 20 April and they have already been working for almost three weeks.

  We drink our coffees, chat; then, once Éric finishes his cigarette, we walk out into the glare without bothering to lock the cabin (there’s nobody around for miles) and drive off to clear snow from the roof of Europe.

  It is an obvious and yet rarely considered fact that many of the roads that are central to cycling’s mystique exist on the very margins of reality. They are places that can be said only properly to be there for four or five months of the year. In Europe’s high mountains, if a climb doesn’t lead somewhere important, like a ski resort, then most of the time, typically between early October and late May, it is shut. It is often covered with snow: at best, a lazy blue run; at worst, buried without a trace. Galibier, Croix de Fer, Tourmalet, Aubisque, Stelvio, Gavia: out of sight, but not out of mind – their names live on in our memories of the races we have watched and the rides we have done, or in our daydreams of sunny days to come.

  In the summer, they are alive, busy with cyclists, hikers, motorbikes and even coach parties. Then, towards the end of each year, they revert from being a torture chamber or paradise (delete as applicable) for cyclists back to the harsh, untamed wilderness they otherwise are. And then, at the start of each following year, they need to be dug out so that we can enjoy them again. The responsibility for that lies with municipal authorities and so, propelled by an obscure conviction that significant things must happen there when cyclists are not around, I sought permission to go up the Bonette with the road-clearing crew. That meant arranging a meeting with Aurelien, Didier, Bernard (we’ll come to Bernard later) and Éric’s boss. His office was at the municipal depot in Saint Étienne de Tinée, the pretty village at the southern foot of Bonette. There, above the garages housing the salting lorries and the snowploughs, subdivision head Jean-Marie-André Fabron (soft pinstriped red shirt with the sleeves rolled up, three buttons loose, gold necklace not quite big enough to be termed a medallion nestling in a bed of grey chest hair), who talked me through the work and explained the schedule: that the département administration was obliged to secure the Bonette road as far as the little hamlet of Bousiéyas by 20 April, so people could get back into their houses and check what damage had occurred over the winter, and that was when they would begin the snow-clearing work in earnest; given good weather they should be hitting the top of the col around 20 days after that; and, since the local authority on the other side didn’t have much money, the annual agreement was for the southern crew then to head down the northern road and clear that, even though it wasn’t really in their jurisdiction. If the other side was not, strictly speaking, their responsibility, it was definitely in their interest: once the road opens, Jean-Marie said, the cyclists, motorcyclists and hikers come – 100,000 to 120,000 motor vehicles in the four peak months of summer – and the economy in both valleys is boosted by 25 per cent. On top of that, I thought, it must get boring living at the end of a col-de-sac, mustn’t it? For seven months a year only to have one route to the outside world. To be able to turn left as well as right, and go to Jausiers for your shopping instead of Nice; that must be nice for locals too.

  Jean-Marie’s office was finished in light varnished slatted wood, in a ski chalet style, though the cheap lino floors and ringing telephones were a reminder of the council business at hand. On the walls were maps of the region and a few small photos of himself and others at the top of the mountain, dwarfed between white walls of snow, with huge road-clearing machinery behind them. He showed me more photos on his computer: guys in sports sunglasses and big coats with thermos cups in hand, posing smiling year after year behind the diggers, as if the magic of the thing, of the journey through the wardrobe to Narnia, never quite wore off.

  It looked like quite a party. And the mountain man in him bristled when I cautiously inquired whether it was – although clearly good fun – risky in any way, shape or form. ‘Not dangerous!’ he scoffed, took stock a second, and finished up: ‘Bon. There is still that sheer weight of snow …’

  Jean-Marie was the boss of the whole of the Tinée valley, named after the tiny river that wells up just under the summit of the mountain and which runs 75 kilometres down to join the Var river not far from Nice. His beat included five ski stations, 14 villages and at least one other high mountain pass. But it all paled in front of the Bonette: ‘Bonette is a special mission,’ he said. ‘For me, for my teams of guys … it’s a source of pride for us to do it.’ Even in summer he sent a road-sweeping lorry up there almost every day. From Saint Étienne’s position of relative shelter at 1,100 metres you could never quite know what the weather was doing up there, and the friable rocks at the top were prone to rockfalls or even landslides in freak summer storms. ‘We don’t want cyclists hitting stones,’ he said.

  Once I explained what I wanted to do, Jean-Marie was almost extravagantly unconcerned about letting me loose in the pristine wildernesses above, with the avalanches and the ice sheets and all that heavy machinery. But this was October. I wouldn’t be able to hitch a lift on a snowplough until April or May next. Jean-Marie said he’d drop me a line when the work was in progress, and I left.

  The Col de la Bonette closed just a couple of days after my visit, on 13 October. It is often called the ‘highest paved road’ in Europe, and it is always one of the first to be surrendered to the winter snows. But, if we’re being honest, it is not really Europe’s highest paved road. That accolade is usually given to the Cime de la Bonette road, above the col. We commonly think of cols as high places, but col is the French word for a mountain pass, and a pass is usually, relatively speaking, the opposite of a high place: it is the lowest or the most easily accessible way of crossing a shoulder of land between two peaks, from one valley into another. The Col de la Bonette-Restefond, to give it its full title is, at 2,715 metres high, superseded by s
everal roads in Europe, including the Col de l’Iséran (2,770 metres) behind Val d’Isère in the French Alps and the Passo dello Stelvio (2,757 metres) near the Italian border with Switzerland. Cime, on the other hand, means ‘summit’, and the Cime road, at 2,802 metres, is widely proclaimed to be the highest paved road on the continent. It is a loop that lassos the Cime de la Bonette itself, the dark, very regular pyramid-shaped peak which has a viewpoint and a panorama on top. However, the Cime is actually not the highest paved road either. The Ötztal Glacier road in Sölden, Austria, is surfaced higher, but it’s a toll road and a dead end; the Pico de Veleta in Spain’s Sierra Nevada is higher too, but that’s also a dead end and vehicle access is restricted.

  And so the Cime de la Bonette may conceivably be the highest inter-valley road in Europe, which is, if you dig into the history a bit, pretty much what it was built to be.

  Though there had long been a mule track over the mountain, the road was not built on the northern side until the end of the 19th century, and even then it did not connect with the villages in the south. It rose, via a slightly different route called the Col de Restefond, to link two military barracks, and did not go further. The two sides weren’t truly connected until 1950, when the junction was made with the existing road on the south side. Previously, that had only reached as far as Bousiéyas which, at 1,880 metres above sea level, was about halfway up. Quickly the new route, the first proper link between the départements on either side, became popular with tourists, but the road at the top was in a terrible state. It was now strategically useless so the army had no interest in maintaining it. But given that it was perilous, remote and extremely high (and also partly belonged to the army), the regional authorities on either side weren’t keen on spending any money either. Finally, the prefect ruled that the state wouldn’t give any funds unless it became a ‘prestige’ road. What better way to do that than to abandon the old Restefond col and build a new road along the top of the ridge, add a little loop around the peak and go for the altitude record? So that’s what they did, and the road as we now know it opened in 1961.