ON THE ROAD
Journey to Slovenia’s Julian Alps and you’ll be rewarded with some of the finest mountain roads in Europe
Section editor John Whitney journeys to Slovenia to tackle some of the awesome climbs of the Julian Alps. On the way he experiences the spectacular scenery, discovers the area’s history and his guide’s love of 1980s rock music...
WORDS JOHN WHITNEY PHOTOGRAPHY MAX BURGESS
Eoin, tell me, what are your needs?” enquired Klemen. Sweat pouring down his pained face, and breathing heavy, Eoin’s reply is quick and to the point, if a little beyond Klemen’s capabilities. “A helicopter and a hospital.” Klemen is Klemen Cepirlo, our driver, mechanic, soigneur and local sage all rolled into one compact Slovenian package. Eoin is Eoin McCoy, an Irishman living in Poland’s Krakow for the past 18 years and one of several guests today of cycling holiday outfit Podia – also based in Krakow – on this, its first ‘Roadventure’ trip to Slovenia’s Julian Alps.
Eoin’s anguish is understandable. We’re on the fourth and final day of an increasingly mountain-packed trip to the northwestern corner of this central European country and Max Burgess, Podia’s founder, has conspired, Grand Tour-like, to backload the trip with Slovenia’s biggest road challenge – its highest road, the Mangart.
Previous days had seen us explore the mountains and valleys of the Triglav National Park and today, our final ride of the trip, had dialled up the altitude with passage over the Vrši , a 1611m giant of the region that’s simultaneously both beauty and beast. If the Vrši Pass had added another 400 vertical metres to any of the previous climbs we’d ridden, the towering Mangart, its head in the clouds of an increasingly brooding late afternoon sky, does likewise, crashing through the 2000m mark and adding another 72 for good measure.
At the point where Eoin had made his tongue-in-cheek call for aerial assistance we’d been climbing for 15km from Bovec, our base for the week and where we’d passed through again on our way to the Mangart. But the 11.7km up to the Mangart Saddle, as it’s known, had yet to begin. Eoin’s needs – all our needs – would become far greater before they subsided.
Small and mighty
Small in stature, Slovenia still manages to packs a wallop. That’s particularly true of the Triglav National Park, with its eponymous mountain standing at 2864m – both Slovenia’s highest peak and that of the whole former Yugoslavia. Much of Triglav covers the mountainous region known as the Julian Alps, which span northeastern Italy and Slovenia, and named after Julius Caesar.
In professional road cycling terms Slovenia, a country of just 2million people, punches well above its weight. The current men’s WorldTour is packed with Slovenians, including Primož Rogli (Team LottoNL–Jumbo) and Matej Mohori (Bahrain-Merida), and
we spotted a flying UAE Team Emirates-clad cyclist on one of our morning car transfers. If it was a home-grown rider, it could only have been Jan Polanc.
The Julian Alps don’t get as much love as neighbouring Alps in Italy, France and Switzerland when it comes to elite bike racing, even from the Tour of Slovenia. Though the country’s national race has climbed the Vr i Pass, it’s done so just once (2013) in the past decade, before that, in 2007, a young Vincenzo Nibali took one of the first wins of his career here.
The Mangart remains untapped, though that, says the race’s press officer, is more because of the “logistical nightmare” of taking the race up such a high, isolated, deadend road. It’s actually their dream to head up there.
What this means is that the region fits nicely into Podia’s ‘Hidden Europe’ message – taking cyclists to the less-heralded but no less magnificent regions of Europe that fly under the radar. Shortly after making the mammoth 12hour drive back to Krakow, Max was prepping for a road trip through the Tatra Mountains, which border both his adopted home Poland and Slovakia. In August, he’ll further explore the Carpathian Mountains, of which the Tatras make up a small part. The company also did its first ‘Gravelventure’ in May, in the Beskid Mountains in the eastern Carpathians. This is its third year of trips – and the first outside of Poland – expanding the company even further from what initially started out as a blog.
Max, 39, had a career in television and after aborting a switch to architecture, he developed Podia. He became hooked on cycling during his time at his first (and last) architecture job, to the point where it became a bit of a running joke with the receptionist when Rapha’s black envelopes would arrive on a near daily basis.
From blogging about his cycling adventures, the barrage of black envelopes dried up when he started designing and producing his own kit. From there his love for travel inevitably ended with the
The Julian Alps don’t get as much love as neighbouring Alps when it comes to elite bike racing
professional trips he now runs. It’s largely a twoperson band – his wife Magda the logistical lynchpin yin to his creative dreamer yang – though they recruit people for their trips, guys like Klemen, and ride guide Maciej Proficz, who as well as being a top road racer also moonlights as the frontman in a death metal band, Dormant Audio.
Car share
To see the best of the Julian Alps and not have 160km-plus days to tame, car transfers are a necessary evil, and so it was that our 93km ride began in Maciej’s van. Our base for the week was the small ski resort town of Bovec, on the western edge of Triglav close to the Italian border, and it would be an hour’s drive to another town, the larger Kranjska Gora, at the base of the Vrši , where our ride would begin.
Despite his musical pedigree, Maciej’s listening tastes are far broader and the journey to the start was accompanied by mass singalongs to the back catalogue of American rockpop heroes Toto. Maciej belted out Rosanna in particular with gusto.
This drive took us up a road that had become familiar. Around 15km from Bovec, we’d descended down it on day two to finish the ride, driven up it on day three to get to the start at Lake Bohinj and were due to end today coming down off the Mangart. Descending it is a blast, full of new tarmac, steep slopes and sinewy bends.
“I can’t wait to come down this again,” exclaimed an excited Micha¯ Tretyn, one of Podia’s paying punters.
“You’re going to have to go up it first,” I offered back. “Excuse me?” “You have to go up it. This takes us up to the start of the Mangart, and then we come back down it on the way to the hotel,” I insisted.
In all, the Vršic has 50 hairpins, every one of them numbered, Alpe d’Huez-like
If it wasn’t for Toto, I reckon I’d have heard his heart sinking – it’s a stinker of climb.
In truth, the Vr i was little easier but where the climb to the Mangart is a long slog up on an unremarkable main road, the Vr i , especially from the Kranjska Gora side, is – and this might sound like a writer overplaying their hand – one of the finest stretches of asphalt to be found anywhere in Europe. Not that it is all asphalt. Each hairpin on this northern side of the pass remains cobbled and another reason why this is the best side to climb – though each section is small and wellmaintained, you don’t want to corner them in the wet.
The Russian Road
As beautiful a sight as the pass is in 2018, it forever carries a tragic history. While a version of the pass had already existed before World War One, the pass we know today is largely thanks to the work of over 10,000 Russian prisoners of war, under the watch of their Austrian captors. In the spring of 1916, two severe avalanches claimed over 300 Russian lives and several Austrian guards. The chapel at kilometre four on the Kranjska Gora side was built a year later by the prisoners in memory of their fallen comrades and their own suffering. In 2006, 90 years after its construction, the Slovenian government paid for its restoration and renamed this stretch the Russian Road.
Your suffering will be put firmly in perspective, but it’s only after the chapel that the 9.25km Vr i gets its claws into you, and barring a couple of flat sections it’s largely double digits from there to the 1611m summit – the highest pass in Slovenia.
If this side is the best to climb, the south, free of cobbles, is surely the best descent, with most of the summer tourist traffic seemingly turning back for Kranjska Gora at either the summit or the chapel, allowing us a largely free run at the 26 hairpins and 12km (8.1 per cent) into Trenta.
In all, the Vr i has 50 hairpins, every one of them numbered, Alpe d’Huez-like. But which came first? In his book Mountain Higher, cycling journalist Daniel Friebe tells the story of Georges Rajon, who took the
We’d got what we’d come for – a spectacular ride in one of Europe’s best-kept secrets Vršic, especially from the Kranjska Gora side, is one of the finest stretches of asphalt in Europe
Tour de France to Alpe d’Huez in 1952. A frequent visitor to Slovenia, he was the owner of the Alpe’s Hotel Christina, now in the hands of his daughter Christiane, who confirmed her father brought the idea home from one of his many Slovenian hunting holidays.
Lunch was taken at the foot of the Vr i in Trenta. In character with the rest of my week with Podia, it was late, long and leisurely, with pizza eaten and beers sunk on the warmest, brightest day of the week. One rider’s bike computer actually had a beer count metric, showing how many beers he could drink to make up his calorie deficit. It was wise he didn’t take up the computer’s invitation to sink eight lagers, given it had gone 3pm, we’d only covered 24km of 93km and had almost 2000m still to climb, the bulk of it in one continuous chunk up the Mangart.
Like Vr i , here’s another climb built for war. This time it was the Italian army, constructing it in 1938 over six months as defence against the Yugoslav army. The final climb of both the day and the trip is tough, but shorn of this context, the Mangart, climbing 980m in 12km, was objectively the biggest challenge of the trip. Second to its Wikipedia entry on Google is its dangerousroads.org webpage, which hadn’t escaped anybody’s attention.
There’s nothing to be overly concerned about, just a few notes of caution. It’s a dead-end road (the summit – the saddle, a bell-shaped loop – overlooks Italy) so it’s not used that often, which means debris, particularly early in the summer, is often strewn across the road. It’s very narrow and there are several poorly lit tunnels, that make for a weirdly sense-deprived riding experience if you don’t have lights.
Our long charge to the summit was abruptly cut short just before it. Given the Mangart isn’t a pass, local authorities weren’t in a hurry to clear the winter snowfall. Just as we were about to corner one of the final bends, a head-height blockade of snow stopped us in our tracks.
Reluctantly turning around, we were left to look back down this spectacular mountain from the highest road in the country (well, almost!). The poor weather promised at the start of the day had stayed away, but now, close to 7pm, it was belatedly closing in, and fast. But we’d already got what we’d come for – a spectacular ride in one of Europe’s best-kept secrets. The hard work was done and all that remained was the long descent back to our Bovec base. Our needs? Every one of them, well and truly satisfied.