Stelvio Day 2019

[Daveyraveygravey]

If you have never ridden the Stelvio, have a think about going on Stelvio Day, the one day a year when they close the road to vehicles. It’s free, you don’t even have to register, you just turn up and ride.
This is the site for Stelvio Day - http://www.stelviopark.bz.it/en/radtag/ I'm waiting for the update for 2019.

Admittedly, it is a long way from the UK, and accomadation is very hard to find in the area this weekend. I think they get 11,000 riders when the weather is nice, and the hotels etc get booked up before Christmas.  I managed to find somewhere that seemed reasonable, but it was outside Bormio at +400 m, which I didn't realise until we started driving up to it the night before. This might be on the Gavia route, or close by.  

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We had a long drive to do on Saturday after my ride, so I got up before 6.  I was still a bit sleepy, I couldn't work out how to get out of the hotel!  I drove down into Bormio as I couldn't face the climb back to the hotel, and thinking about it now, riding down in the dark with a mere 6 degrees really would have frozen me before the main event.  I then faffed about trying to find a car park space that I was sure was near the start of the climb, eventually settling for a small space near the "Bormio" sign in bricks on a corner.

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There weren't many riders around, and I was beginning to think I had the wrong weekend; luckily I spotted the road closure sign around the next corner.



The road closure is from 8 am til 4 pm, so I still had some traffic to cope with; most of it was considerate but there are aholes everywhere.  It felt to me like the Italians have got worse for close passing in the two years since I last rode in Italy. The early stages see you climb up away from Bormio, with fantastic views over your left shoulder to the valley below.



After a few km, you turn east-ish into another valley, which starts with a pretty flat km, and the tunnels are in this section. One of them is narrow enough to be one-way and have traffic lights to control the flow; the longest is around 250 m I think. I have a Giant Neostrack computer which I have been really pleased with, but it really couldn’t deal with the tunnels. My Strava trace jumps a couple of km to the other side of the valley in two of them, and does some weird stuff in the others.









After the tunnels section, the hairpins come closely packed for a while, 14 of them over 3 km. I love the signs, but I found it hard to deal with the numbers, even in this part when it felt like you got through a lot (relatively) quickly. Passing the 29th hairpin knowing you have another 28 more ahead of you wasn’t very motivating.





This was taken at 7,59, one minute before the road closure; it makes it look busier than it was!

Looking back down the valley after the 14 hairpins



Then you are climbing up the valley towards the peak, about 4 km without a hairpin, the sun was beginning to climb and light up the valley by now. There’s a church and memorial to the Italians that died here during the First World War. You can’t imagine what it would have been like to have been fighting a war up here a hundred years ago, as you keep grinding out your rhythm on the pedals. On the other side of the memorial is a dairy farm that was put in during Mussolini’s time, using electricity and modern machinery, to prove how advanced Italy had become under Fascism. One of the last cars to come up the climb had to wait for me to get out of the entrance to the farm as I was taking pictures so he could drive in.







Just before the Umbrail turning are 4 more hairpins, which is where I was passed by another cyclist. He went down the Umbrail road, so I didn’t feel so bad about being overtaken! I might have been the first Englishman up from Bormio on the day... The final 3 km have 6 or 7 hairpins, and felt really hard to me. I think the gradient is highest here, and of course you are near the top of the climb so the air is at its thinnest. There was music playing, and a load of banners, and something about Running the Stelvio, which I thought had been the week before. I thought about buying a Stelvio jersey, partly as a souvenir, but also because I knew I was going to be cold going back down. We’d spent some time in the shops and cafes at the top when we had driven up the day before, so I didn’t feel the need to hang around. The people organising the running event were inflating large sausage shaped barriers to corale the runners when they finished, I had a bit of a struggle to get past both of them.









Had a quick look at the climb up from Prato -



The descent was magical, hard, but magical. After my accident last year, I am paranoid about crashing, and my brakes are a bit grabby which really doesn’t help the confidence.



Other riders were only just getting to the top, but the further down I went there were larger and larger groups of them. It was interesting seeing their reactions to someone already coming down; a real mixture of surprise, friendliness and irritation! I had a couple of incidences of having to shout to warn climbers who had wandered all over the road, but at my reduced descending speed it wasn’t a major problem.



By the time I was going through the tunnels section, the numbers of climbers were getting larger and larger. I saw one guy on a hand-bike, two people with baby trailers behind, a small bunch of runners, loads of walkers and a couple of those land-skis they have in the mountains, along with all the other types of bike. When I got back to my car, I had to wait to cross the road, and then once in the car, I had a really long wait as the cyclists seemed to be flooding out of Bormio.



What a day! You know those days, when the road and weather come together to make an experience you have dreamt about and planned for years exceed all expectations, to sear the pictures in your brain?!  Wow! 
We go to Italy every year during the last two weeks of August, and have discovered various different ways of getting there. In 2017 I tried to do this ride from Prato, but the weather was very bad. It was hard to take having spent two weeks frying on the beach on the Adriatic coast in 32+ degrees to see the forecast for the Stelvio region saying rain or even snow at the end of the month! The forecast was bang on, we got to our accomadation in Solda in drizzle and 10 degrees at 1800 hours, the overnight forecast said it was getting worse. The organisers closed the road to all traffic in the morning, there was ice and snow from about half way up.
Unfortunately, last year I crashed on the bike and broke my scapula 2 days before we were due to start the journey...luckily my daughter's boyfriend was coming along to share the driving, and the comfiest place for my body was sat in a car seat with the elbow rest... Anyway, this all meant I hadn't done a proper mountain climb for two years, the South Downs have plenty of the short steep climbs that are common in southern England, but nothing like the mountains, where you just sit in bottom gear for what seems like hour after hour, sweat running off your sunnies and splattering the top tube, occasionally you check you haven't got a gear left...

[ALawson]

Nice write up. Ridden it in the garage on Fulgaz.

May need to venture to Italy next year potentially!

[leyorkie]

There’s a whole range of road closures for most of the Classic French climbs over the summer months.

[Daveyraveygravey]

leyorkie said:

There’s a whole range of road closures for most of the Classic French climbs over the summer months.

I did think I had read that somewhere but wasn't sure.

I was torn between doing it early, and delaying til more riders were climbing, but we had a long drive to make sure of being at the tunnel the next day. The car sat nav through in an extra mountain pass too, so the drive was even longer!

[leyorkie]

Here’s a copy of July edition of Cycle magazine listing the cols and dates available
Too late for this year but the web sites are listed for next year.