From Laruns the Aubisque starts as a valley road along the Gave d'Ossau and gives no warning at all. It turns at Eaux-Bonnes, and from there it does not let go: the last ten kilometres average well over eight per cent and the hardest of them sit at nine.
Seventeen kilometres and 1,202 metres, back-loaded in a way few Pyrenean climbs are. The first five kilometres are under five per cent — free time that a rider almost always spends, and then has to find again above the village where there is nothing cheap left to take.
The far side is the one in the photographs. Between Aubisque and Soulor the road runs as a balcony cut into the cliff, through unlit galleries, with a low parapet and a long way down. It is the most exposed tarmac in the Pyrenees, and it turns the descent into a handling problem rather than a recovery.
Photography
Michael Blann
Rider
Every SWI is laid up for one rider — their weight, their power, the way they actually ride. One uninterrupted carbon shell, formed in a single mould, built for a body rather than a size chart. It is the whole reason the same mountain feels different underneath two frames.
Michael Blann
For the people who live beneath them the great European ranges are simply a way of life. For everyone else they are scenery. For a cyclist they are none of those things — they are an appointment with your own limits, and the reason a road that goes nowhere useful is worth riding at all.
Michael Blann has spent years photographing the climbs that made the sport: the Alps, the Dolomites, the Pyrenees, the Ardennes. The pictures are landscape photography of a very high order, but the book is really about what those places do to the people who ride them — an argument built from light, weather and altitude, with recollections from professional riders threaded through it.
If you have ever ridden one of these roads, or intend to, it is the closest thing to being back on it.
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