11 minute read
Tunnel vision
Many of Europe’s mountain roads resemble a labyrinth of tunnels – some short, some terrifyingly lengthy, especially for cyclists. Veteran Audaxer Francis Cooke explains why he, together with his partner Sheila Simpson, are so often drawn to ride these dark and forbidding mountain caverns
Tunnelvisions
Advertisement
THE PASSO DI SAN BOLDO I love tunnels. A sketch of the Passo di San Boldo in the Dolomites (which was featured in Arrivée 146) hangs in my house. We always thought it looked like a fantastic place – so back in 1994 Sheila and I set off to see it for ourselves.
We took the Bike Bus to Venice and then rode north into the Dolomites, aiming to take part in the Dolomite Marathon, a Marmotte-like sportif attracting thousands of riders, 220km over seven big mountain passes. Our gateway into the Dolomites, after several hours of flattish cycling, was to be the Passo San Boldo (706m) – no great height but an abrupt climb from near-sea-level.
It’s a narrow notch in the cliff, and every hairpin is contained inside a dark semi-circular tunnel, making a crazy-looking staircase up the cliff face. It’s a bit like the back way into Mordor, and any one of the tunnels could easily be Shelob’s lair.
The route controlled by traffic lights, top, bottom and centre, to alternate the traffic flow. These lights were an
irrelevance to us. At our climbing pace, by the time we reached midway they had probably changed several times. And we had seen no traffic anyway, having deliberately timed our climb for lunchtime. And so we inched on up. The midway light turning to red as we passed it.
PICTURE: FRANCIS COOKE
Suddenly, the narrow gorge was filled with a raucous wailing. Now here’s a thing about cycling in Italy – many of the motorists are quite flamboyant in their driving style. They pass a bit close and fast, and cut in likewise. It takes a day or two to get used to it.
Three small red cars had just launched out of the top tunnel and were barrelling down the hairpins toward us. Obviously lunchtime was over. The din as they careered through each tunnel was colossal, megaphone exhausts further amplified and then echoing across the cliffs and back. We could only pull over on a straight bit and be as visible as possible.
It was noisy, but it didn’t last long. At the top we popped out through a final short tunnel straight into the welcoming village of San Boldo… panting a little.
Sheila’s back light recedes into the Livigno Tunnel
THE LIVIGNO TUNNEL A few years later, Sheila and I arrived at the entrance to the Livigno Tunnel. It is high in the Alps on the Swiss-Italian border – in fact the north portal is a Swiss border post. If you’re planning a similar trip, don’t forget that this was a while ago, and conditions change. A route which was passable then may not be passable now. I believe that cyclists must now use a transfer bus to get through this tunnel.
The Livigno Tunnel is only one carriageway wide. It’s a dimly-lit road, stretching for almost 4km with a kink in the middle. It also climbs slightly from north to south (the way we were going), about 100 metres over its length. This ferret-hole takes heavy traffic, lots of coaches and ten-wheel wagons, and has traffic lights at each end so that the traffic piles up at the tunnel mouth until a load of downstream
P I C T U R E : F R A N C I S C O O K E
❞
PICTURE: FRANCIS COOKE
traffic is disgorged, then the lights change and everyone charges in.
We sat around and watched this for a while. From a cyclist’s point of view, it didn’t look good. I looked at a forbidding sign by the tunnel mouth which featured a bike and a stream of German text ending in an exclamation mark. The border guards didn’t seem bothered about us. There was nothing for it, we had two more high passes awaiting us on the other side, so we lit up and when the next convoy went in we were on their back wheel.
The din receded, the red lights receded, flickered and went out; the air was surprisingly fresh and so, all was peace. It really was a wonderful Zen ride through a tomb-like passage. Of course, there was an edge of anxiety as well. Was that a red light ahead? No? Yes? The red morphed and multiplied through orange and yellow to white, and we flattened ourselves against the tunnel wall and chaos and fury was upon us.
Now we were clear to carry on, but this time with our ears pinned back to catch the next convoy coming up behind us. This peace-chaos-peace cycle repeated several more times before we emerged blinking into Italy, with my tunnel-lust cured for a day or two at least. THE TUNNEL DU PARPAILLON This tunnel (2,645m) is one of the highest and most remote in the Alps. Just getting there is a big, big climb – 1,950 metres from the valley bottom to the tunnel portal. Although it is quite far south in France, at this height you can expect to find some ice in here at any time of year. It was high summer when Sheila and I passed through, and the whole tunnel was waterlogged. We had to wade sometimes thigh-deep, and the floor under the water was still a sheet of ice. And it’s about 700m long. Just the ticket on a sweltering July day in Haute Provence. If you have wondered what Sheila gets up to these days, after riding her seventh PBP in 2007 – since then she has concentrated on leading cycle tours in France, the Alps and India. This means she is on first-name terms with hoteliers the length and breadth of France, and, bizarrely, in India she is known as “Madame Sheila”. A personal landmark was reached in Kashmir, where, at an age of 65, she took her bike up the Khardung La (5,359m – La is Tibetan for Pass) – a record height that is very hard to beat. THE TUNNEL DU MORTIER Sheila’s favourite tunnel is one with no motor traffic at all. This is the Tunnel du Mortier (1,389m) in a remote corner of the Vercors in France. It gets a mention on the website www. dangerousroads.org, but although it is an abandoned tunnel, its relatively recent construction means it’s quite safe and easy to ride through, provided you have a good front light. It just doesn’t go anywhere. At the far end there’s a small platform to dismount and park your bike – and then it’s a sheer drop down a huge vertical cliff face. Scenically, it’s wonderful.
There used to be a road leading up into the Vercors from Grenoble. The tunnel was built to serve the Winter Olympics in 1968. The first of the landslips was three years later, and more soon followed. Ever since this grand, broad, cement-lined tunnel has stood unused but pristine. It’s just one of several atmospheric tunnels and “balcony” roads in this historic area, that fall comfortably into the “impossible engineering” category. ❝ A personal landmark was reached in Kashmir, where, at the age of 65, [Sheila] took her bike up the Khardung La – 5,359m – a record height that is very hard to beat
❞PICTURE: FRANCIS COOKE
PICTURE: SHEILA SIMPSON
THE COL DU GALIBIER TUNNEL A more familiar sight to Alpine tourists is the summit tunnel on the Col du Galibier (2,647m). This tunnel, at 2,556
metres altitude and only about 400m long, is actually quite old, and was derelict for most of the last century, but more recently was re-lined with a concrete pipe and re-opened for use by motorists. It’s even narrower than the Livigno Tunnel and likewise controlled by lights – generally cyclists shouldn’t use it. Instead we cross over the top of this magnificent pass on a shabby little road that would be gone by now if it were not for the annual ritual of the Tour de France.
A few years ago Sheila and I crossed the Galibier on the same day as the Marmotte – upwards of 4,000 cyclists in a hurry… going the opposite way. We weren’t entirely taken by surprise so had set off early to try to get at least to the top before meeting the marauding horde or worse, getting stopped by marshals. Having previously ridden in the event ourselves, we had a decent idea of their schedule. But I’m not as nippy up the big climbs as I used to be, and we were still well short of the summit when the leaders, descending very fast and no doubt expecting a clear road, were upon us. We did what we could to stay out of their way as a trickle became a torrent and eventually we reached the sanctuary of the old hostelry that marks one end of the tunnel, where we had room to stop and enjoy the spectacle. Clearly it seemed, it would be madness to wind our way over the top as ever more cyclists poured over the narrow summit. And this would go on for hours. The tunnel, however, did not look very appealing, and in any case, was probably verboten. There was no shortage of gendarmes standing around with their beady eyes on us.
It was going to be Livigno all over again but at least this was only 400m, you could see the other end, even before going in, and the traffic was only cars, not lorries. We made a big thing of checking our lights and lining up by the tunnel portal, ready to jump on the tail of the last car in.
The police, we could see, were in agreement that we were taking the least worst option. In we went, sprinting heads down as the last car pulled away in front of us. It was black! No tunnel lighting whatsoever. Our eyes had no time to adjust, and our small touring front lights were sucked up by the matt concrete pipe. I could feel my balance going, but just concentrated on staying in the middle so that our lights and silhouettes were unmissable if any traffic entered. It was horrible. We couldn’t afford to slow down, we had to sprint all the way, one of our shortest tunnel experiences, in and out in less than a minute – but one of my worst ever.
THE PAS DE MORGINS Most tunnels are great fun to ride through, but there are some that are categorically forbidden to cyclists. I would never intentionally enter one, but I’ve been through a couple, failing to notice any signage to stop me. One time, Sheila was leading her group towards the Swiss-French border at the Pas de Morgins (1,369m). We came across an unfamiliar new tunnel at the foot of the climb, leading up and away from the Swiss Rhone valley and signposted to France, and in we all went, all innocent-like.
Our friend Eve’s main climbing weapons are determination and will-power – in other words, on any climb she soon gravitates to the back. My job was to ride shotgun. It was a modern, well-lit dual carriageway of a tunnel, and quite noisy with the traffic, and as it turned out, about 1.5km long. I find such places stimulating, but they aren’t to everybody’s taste. I was doing my best to keep Eve’s spirits up when suddenly the whole tunnel went into “emergency” mode, with flashing amber lights all along the roof as far as the eye could see. I thought, “uh-ho”. But I said “keep going”, but I reckoned we were probably not yet half way through. Sure enough, within a minute a police motorcyclist pulled alongside and kept pace, haranguing us about being someplace we shouldn’t. I decided to play for time since I figured that, once we were past halfway, the gendarme would have no sensible alternative but to allow us to continue through. I said something incomprehensible in atrocious pidgin French/German/Italian, so that it took a while for us to negotiate a common lingo – French. Then I stoutly maintained our innocence, saying (in very bad French) that there were no signs to say “no cycling”, which was true. “Ou est les signs?” I repeated, trying a Gallic shrug while trying not to run into Eve, who was doing her bit by avoiding eye contact and pretending that her world wasn’t flashing amber.
By now we were definitely more than halfway through, and I could tell that my Cunning Plan was working, though in general I don’t like to argue with a man with a gun. The gendarme (who turned out to be a very nice guy) was settling for riding shotgun to my shotgun, and so we eventually emerged from the pulsating drama into the daylight, which seemed rather dull by comparison.
However, he wasn’t going to leave it there, and so I continued with my “Ou est les signs?” banter. He asked me to look back at the tunnel entrance, which was adorned with quite a lot of signage but nothing that I could see about bicycles. I said as much. Specifically then, he pointed to the sign which said “Minimum speed – 55kph”. Then he smiled and with the faintest of bows, wished us Bon Voyage.
