Wednesday 13 September 2023
| Distance (km) | 12 kms | |||
| Distance (time) | 4.5 hrs | |||
| Climb / Descent | 940m / 215m | |||
| Hard / Soft surface | 30% / 70% | |||
| Landscape |
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| Weather |
 25° 0 Bft
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Where we did almost only descending yesterday, today will be mostly climbing.
Since this is more our cup of, well, coffee, we should be fine. Yesterday for the first time we saw the sky becoming less blue and more veiled and so we kind of expected a change of weather coming up. And indeed it did: last night we had some rain and now in the morning it is quite overcast with some occasional sun. But it is still 25 degrees and with the high humidity it feels very sticky. But this is typical September weather: over summer the temperature gradually drops but the humidity rises. Long time ago, when I was still a cyclist, a German fellow cyclist once explained cycling in southern France as "in July you're pan fried, in August you're slow cooked and in September you're steamed." Well, we just moved from slow cooking to steaming. Anyway, from St.Sauveur we follow the old road to Rimplas. The first part is actually a tarmac road going up to Chapelle St.Roch. The chapel doesn't look very old and is closed, so no idea how nice and historic the inside might be. After the chapel the road changes to a narrow concrete road with lateral grooves which is rather unusual for public road. In Spain, and in particular in Basque country, Cantabria and Asturias. There they're usually horrendously steep and they have no shame sending the entire Vuelta a España up those roads. After a house still under construction we keep left and now we are on just a forest track. For a while it seems accessible with a (4x4) car, but at some point it's just a single trail though it is clear that this road/track used be wider. We keep going along the mountain side, and at some point the trail becomes a 4x4 track again. But it's clear why they built a new road: the old one has a lot of stone rubble and a couple of warnings for rock fall. It's clearly unsuitable to serve as a road. But it is nice, gentle and pleasant to walk and before we know it we're in Rimplas. Time for an early lunch break. From Rimplas we have to descend again, and again this looks a lot like an old road but a lot more deteriorated than the climb. But the result is that descending is not so hard. We cross an old stone bridge, the main road between the Tinée and Vésubie valleys and another old stone bridge to reach the lowest point. Hence, we have to start climbing again, to La Bolline. Here the fun is over: the climb is very steep and the track very irregular and covered in heaps of dead leafs which makes harder to see all rocks and holes in the road. Actually, it almost feels like autumn. We enter La Bolline and pass behind a secondary school, after which the road changes to tarmac. That doesn't reduce the slope: it remains steep until after the second little village of Valdeblore: La Roche. Here the gradients ease but we have burnt our fuel and only make slow progress. We pass through fields and admire some of the houses until we reach the camping site. Half an hour faster than what the walking guide indicates. |
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Download track StSStD.gpx