Ride notes: Izoard south side
“The foliage thins and places you in cycling’s grandest amphitheatre”
The Col d’izoard can be climbed by bike both from the north and the south, and if you’re feeling intrepid (and, importantly, fit) you could conceivably do both in a day. Begin in Guillestre on the south side, and once you’ve broken Instagram with summit-posed selfies, enjoy the wooded, serpentine drop into Briançon for lunch, before riding the whole thing in reverse.
Both are fine climbs, but the south side is the original, most challenging and best trodden. It begins in the small town of Guillestre, all ramshackle pastel frontages and mountain shadows. Here, if you’re short on supplies of any kind, it’s wise to fill your pockets — we wouldn’t recommend betting on the capricious business hours of the few establishments that exist on the Izoard itself.
Following the D902 north-east away from town, the dry, scrubby landscape soon gives way to an impressive and imposing gorge. As you’re fresh at this stage and still in possession of all your faculties, you can enjoy this visual treat to the full as the road winds slowly and easily upwards under vast precipices, the urgent River Guil teeming below. There are tunnels along this stretch too, so a rear light is a must.
After around 15 kilometres a large left-hand turn-off with an accompanying Col d’izoard sign indicates that you are ready to begin in earnest.
While there is a noticeable and immediate increase in gradient, it’s initially still a fairly innocuous road that leads you up between meadows that seem to have been borrowed straight from The Sound of Music — the brooding scree slopes of the Casse Déserte and the austere summit air seem a world away.
Into the unknown
The road passes the occasional bar restaurant which represent your final opportunity to take on food and drink before the summit; beyond the clustered chalets of Brunissard it’s just you and the mountain streams.
At the top of the valley, following a long, steep ramp, the road swings right and takes you into the trees, where on steep, winding slopes you’ll stay until emerging blinking-eyed into the Casse Déserte four kilometres later. Once you gain a little altitude, the view back down the valley is beautiful, near-perfect even, a definitive Alpine panorama — so however focused you might be, keep an eye out through the trees.
Eventually, the foliage thins, and a final ramp leads you to a swinging right-hander which places you centre stage in cycling’s grandest amphitheatre — the Casse Déserte. Like a hopeful primary schooler prodded out into the spotlight in front of Cowell and friends on Britain’s
Got Talent, prepare to feel no small amount of awe through the physical exertion at the towering scree slopes reaching up into the cheap seats.
A short downhill affords the legs a breather, but all too soon exertion is required again as the road points upward. At this point you pass the twin-headed Coppi-bobet memorial stones. These two heads of cycling state led the Tour de France over the Izoard five times between them during the Forties and Fifties, and their faces bear empathetic grimaces from which you might draw a little extra momentum.
Just a few hundred yards further on, the summit hoves into view for the first time. Squint hard and you can just make out the memorial stone and perhaps the summit shop. It looks a way off, but long, sweeping ramps draw you quickly closer to the foot of a series of hairpins, on whose bleached and brittle grades you scale the final escarpment of the Izoard’s southern face.