Climb and a half. No climb is as emblematic of the Tour de France as Alpe d’Huez. On the back of its first appearance at the women’s Tour, Cyclist takes a ride around it and up it. And then up it again.
Words: Emily Chapell Photography: Juan Trujillo Andrades
I thought there was only one way off this mountain: via its famous 21 hairpins. But rather than turning left out of our hotel to descend past the ski lifts and building sites of Alpe d’Huez, we head upwards. Within moments the road has narrowed to a single lane and all around us are green pastures, colourful Alpine flowers and distant mountaintops. We’re here to celebrate perhaps the most famous climb ever to feature in the Tour de France – Alpe d’Huez – but our first port of call is the Col de Sarenne, the Alpe’s lesser-known B-side.
The col itself, which we reach just 15 minutes later, is a broad green saddle a shade under 2,000m in height, overlooked by peaks that still bear traces of last winter’s snow. We have it to ourselves aside from an oblivious marmot and a few skylarks. A tiny roadside hut is hung with hand-painted signs promising us cheese and cake, but seems uninhabited. Clément, my ride companion for the day, laughs kindly when I point out just how different this is from the bustling resort we’ve only just left.
This road has been here much longer than the main climb, but is less often used these days. During winter it’s covered in snow but it is a technical challenge in any conditions, especially today because no one has bothered to clear the drifts of gravel that collected on its hairpins during storms a week ago. We descend mindfully southwards into the valley, and eventually Lac du Chambon comes into view, glittering in the morning sunshine.
We cross its hydroelectric dam and peer into the lake’s water, under the surface of which lie three villages and a lavender distillery that were submerged when the dam was built a century ago. In 1935 the Tour de France paid a visit to the site, long before its love affair with a certain set of hairpins along the valley. Back then the main road up to Alpe d’Huez, which we’ll see a lot of later on, was still being renovated from a gravel track into the highway it is today. But we’re not there yet.
Clément signals right and we start our first real ascent of the day, on a quiet road that wriggles its way through deciduous woodland and past chalets whose gardens brim with poppies and lupins. We’ve started early, hoping to avoid the forecasted mid-afternoon showers, and the tarmac is already warm. Tiny lizards scuttle across it and butterflies dance before us as we gain height, our gaze drawn to the tidy green valley below.
‘What’s that grey section?’ I ask, pointing to where fields meet what appears to be desert. Last week’s storms caused a landslide, Clément tells me, sweeping away a road and flooding the small village of La Bérarde. Everyone who lived there had to be evacuated, and it’s not yet clear when – or even if – they’ll be able to return to their homes.
I become suddenly aware of our fragility within this magnificent landscape. Facing us across the valley is a huge whorl of striped rock, laminated like a croissant, showing as clearly as any textbook how layers of ocean sediment are twisted into peaks. The mountains are constantly changing, sometimes so slowly we can’t see it happening, sometimes so suddenly that there is no time to get out of the way.
We watch a tiny swallow dancing in the thermals where rock meets sky, performing the kind of aerial acrobatics that it could only possibly be doing for fun. All at once, the tarmac tilts sharply downhill and Clément becomes a swallow himself, swooping in and out of the folds of the cliff with the joy of one who is completely in his element.
I follow at a more cautious pace, and we pop out in the village of La Garde, which sits on Alpe d’Huez’s fifth hairpin (the corners count down from 21 to zero as you climb). This seems as good a place as any for a coffee stop, so we sip espressos on a shady terrace, watching a stream of Lycra-clad bodies making their way up the mountain, and knowing that eventually we will have to join them. It will be the first of two ascents we’ll be making of this infamous road, although this time it’s really only half the climb, as we’ve skipped the first brutal kilometres, where the gradient averages over 10%.
Alpe d’Huez: part one (the half climb)
The main road to Alpe d’Huez couldn’t be more different from the gritty Col de Sarenne or the undulating balcony route to La Garde, and I can see why the Tour keeps coming back here. Although it was built to service a ski resort, this road could have been purposely designed as the cycling arena it has undeniably become. The surface is immaculate, the gradients are unrelenting and there’s space for the thousands of fans who have lined the route to watch the likes of Pantani, Pinot and Pidcock soar to victory. Each of the signposts that count down the hairpins includes the names of riders who’ve won stages here.
Alpe d’Huez made its first appearance at the men’s Tour in 1952 when Fausto Coppi’s race-winning ascent was broadcast live by motorcycle film crews. I’m convinced this is what led to the climb becoming so famous, as it’s not particularly photogenic. But the broad, reliable road up to the Alpe allowed cameras to get much closer to riders than most other climbs of the time, capturing every grimace and broadcasting them around the world.
It has always been the most voyeuristic of climbs. It’s where Armstrong gave Ullrich ‘The Look’; where LeMond and Hinault struck their 1986 truce. And as the final climb of the final stage of this year’s Tour de France Femmes, another dramatic chapter has now been written.
The first two editions of the race were decided by breakaways on iconic climbs – by Annemiek van Vleuten in the Vosges in 2022, and Demi Vollering on the Tourmalet last year – and this year’s route was designed to continue the tradition. It also paid homage to the Dutch domination of women’s pro cycling, as many of the fans who witnessed the Grand Départ in Rotterdam almost certainly ended up here, on hairpin seven – the one known as Dutch Corner.
In the end, Dutch rider Vollering (Team SD Worx–Protime) managed to win the famous stage, only to fall an agonising four seconds short of overall victory to Poland’s Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon–Sram) in one of the greatest finishes in Tour de France history.
I try to imagine the roaring crowds, but all I can hear is my own panting, which I am trying to conceal from Clément. Eventually we reach the village of Huez about halfway up the climb, where we leave the main drag and follow a small lane between wooden chalets. Soon we’re on another luscious balcony road with another view of the green Romanche Valley and the twisted rocks that overlook it.
Alpe d’Huez: part two (the full monty)
The reason the valley’s so flat, Clément explains, is that it was once a lake. Back in the 12th century an enormous landslide blocked the river, flooding the low-lying villages. Some years later, Lac Saint-Laurent, as it had come to be known, burst through the dam created by the landslide and destroyed much of Grenoble. Roads such as this one, which traverse the steep sides of the valley rather than zigzagging from bottom to top, date from those times, when higher ground would have been judged as safer. That said, it’s called Route de la Confession because it was considered prudent to confess your sins before travelling along it.
We glance back at Alpe d’Huez’s famous hairpins before embarking on a blissful 14km of descent. First we drift along a precarious pine-scented road that clings to the ribs of the mountain, before it broadens into a tumble of switchbacks that take us down to the valley floor, where a newly paved cycle path follows the Romanche back to the base of the Alpe for our second ascent.
I doubt anyone has ever started riding up Alpe d’Huez without some misgivings. The opening section is mercilessly steep and the first hairpin is visible for a cruelly long time before you reach it. The sky has clouded over and the day has cooled, and we give thanks for small mercies as we battle our way upwards.
The cyclists are just as numerous as this morning, but are mostly slower than the ones we saw on our first ascent; either they’re less athletic than the morning crowd or – like ourselves – they’ve ridden a lot further by this point.
We’re both tiring by the time we approach Viele-Alpe, the lowest quartier of the resort, and when Clément warns me that we still have 200m to climb, we pause on hairpin three (Pantani) to catch our breath and gaze at the hotels stacked on the horizon above us.
‘Do you know why it’s called Alpe d’Huez?’ Clément asks, before explaining that alpe refers to the mountain pastures where Huez villagers would take their animals to graze in the summer months.
We ride on, with me musing over the shepherds who worked on these slopes long before there was a road, or a race, or even such thing as a bicycle. Another couple of hairpins takes us into the town, and all of a sudden the finish line arches across the road. Without a word we both begin sprinting up the hill, like so many have before us.
How we did it
Travel: Cyclist flew with Qantas to Paris. We then made our way to Gare de Lyon railway station, where there are five direct TGV trains per day to Grenoble, a journey of just under three hours. From there it’s an hour’s drive to Alpe d’Huez (taxis cost between €150 and €200 – approximately $250 and $330), and around two hours by bus, changing at Le Bourg d’Oisans.
Accommodation: We stayed at Club Med Alpe d’Huez, a modern and luxurious hotel perfectly located near the start of Route du Col de Sarenne. It’s all-inclusive and cyclist-friendly, with a lavish buffet, a full workshop for bikes, a pool and reassuringly competent staff. Doubles start at around $3,800 for a week in July. Visit clubmed.com.au/r/alpe-d-huez/w for info.
Thanks: Cyclist’s ride was greatly enhanced by the company of Clément, our charming guide, and Eric of Bike Experience 21, who was a wealth of local history and kept us going with pâtes de fruit. Particular thanks to Markus and Sara from Canyon for getting a bike to the top of Alpe d’Huez in plenty of time, and the reception staff of Club Med for looking after it.
