Tuesday 6th of September 2011

I was unsure as to what the weather was going to be like today. The forecast on display was suggesting a wet morning. I fancied the planned ride for the day - mostly downhill for the first half, followed by a steep climb and back down before heading back up the valley. Inparticular I was interested in finding out how to get further down the valley or if they just used the road to nowhere and went down the 18% slope. Anyway a late night meant I was even more unlikely to get up early than normal. The alarm went off at 7:30am and I could hear there was no rain. This was a good sign. I hadn't started eating until gone 9am and the ride left at 9:30am so no way I was going to make the start. I considered asking which route they were taking in more detail than the map showed but I thought about a nice little ride up the valley topped off with a steep climb to Refugio i Forni that they did the other day. I tried to start of slowly to warm up but didn't have much choice as the gradient was soon up over 6% after leaving the town. It didn't take that long to get to Santa Caterina ski village and I was thinking I'd rather not head up a dead end road. I'd seen the signs for Gavia and it was one of the passes I wanted to climb so after double checking on a local map in the centre of the village I set off away from the stupid cobbles (look great for tourists, a nightmare for cyclists) up towards the first hairpin. I was not in any rush but as per the route there several mountain bikers were spinning away getting no where and they were passed without any extra effort. I was surprised however by the guy cycling up in bare feet. I later passed him about 6km from the top on my way back down.

The bulk of the first section of the climb is 7.0-9.9% gradient according to my little diagram with a couple of dips down towards 5% and a couple over 10%. However at about 8km in to the climb there was a big stretch of 10%+ on which the GPS was showing 13-14-15%. Ouch that hurt! Thankfully it dropped back down under 10% for a little while before I got to the last 3km which were 2.0-4.9% which felt like downhill in comparison and the speed increased and it was nice to be moving at some pace again. The top was fairly quiet apart from a few bikers arriving and leaving. There were also a couple of guys that got out of a taxi-van at the top with their mountain bikes. Looked like cheating to me! From Bormio it had taken under two hours to do the 26km and I was non-stop from Santa Caterina. Will be interesting to see how long it took from there. The top in the sun wasn't too bad temperature wise. With my arm warmers, gilet and rain jacket on I was ok. I think the machine was reading about 13 degrees. As usual it was initially cold on the way down because of the wind chill factor and because coasting most of the time you don't generate anywhere near as much heat as you do uphill.

Nice cloud to add to the effect

On the way down I stopped many times in the first 10km to get some pictures and then once I had a few I liked I set off down the hill with more pace hitting 70km/h at one point without pedalling.  I'll put a selection of the pics below.

Fresh snow over 3,000m 

Yes that's the road going diagonally from right to left 

Pessimistic road sign.... more like 14%

 

Back within an hour I cleaned up and headed down for the usual jam-tart and fruit and then waited a little to watch the end of the Vuelta stage which looked like chaos. Clearly race radios and stage notes were of little use to those few that went the wrong way at the end. Disaster. Still all the flat straight miles of tarmac in Spain and they put a roundabout in the last km. Crazy.

Dinner was a very nice fresh pasta and asparagus in cream sauce followed by cordon blue - which is two veal steaks (I think) sandwiching ham and cheese. The last one I had in Vienna about 14 years ago nearly gave me a heart attack it was that heavy but this one was much lighter. I went for the menu desert which looked good.